The Slow Motion Retirement Plan

[dhagood]

thanks for asking

the house building phase of the slow motion retirement plan is to sell the house we're in and use that equity to build the ranch/retirement house without taking out any loans. we'll move out of the current house into a fifth wheel mobile home on the property while the new house is being built. theoretically, once this is done we will be debt free. we're likely to have some lingering credit card debt, but nothing too onerous. so, a bunch of threads have to come together at the same time:

we need to have the new house and septic system plans ready to submit for the building permit.
we need to collate, organize, decide whether to keep, donate, or dump, and move all the junk you accumulate in 32 years of marriage and 20 years of living in the same house.
we need to have power, water, and septic available at the property.
we need to have the fifth wheel ready ready to move in.
we need to get the current house ready to sell

once all this is done, we'll move from the current house into the fifth wheel and get on with it. and somewhere there will be the sound of trumpets...

where we are at right now is living in a house that is being refurbished prior to being put on the real estate market. we have just passed peak suck, which is the maximum the house is torn up/non functional/filthy during the reconstruction. peak suck includes:

no lights in any bathroom (got flashlight?)
no kitchen sink
no kitchen countertops
no cooktop
no oven
most of the carpet ripped out, but all the tack strips are still there
stuff stacked everywhere

this is the kitchen pre peak suck:

and post peak suck:

i spend a lot of my time removing tile and drywall and then patching drywall for new tile, moving stuff into a rented storage space or the barn, install new fixtures and appliances, and trying to impose order on chaos. i try to work a day on the house and then a day at the property, but the weather has not been cooperating all that well.

i should have some pictures of the new fence line soon.

 

[dhagood]

new fence pictures, which look just like old fence pictures. this first one is looking west, and connects with a north/south fence line that originally kept livestock out of our major stand of pine trees. I still have to hang the gate and finish installing some fence stays but it is otherwise complete.

this one is looking south, and connects with a short east/west fence line with a gate that you can't quite see in the picture.

these fences keep the livestock out of a L shaped area on the north east corner of our property that contain the barn, the stand of trees, the road, and where our house will sit.

on the current house front, we're getting closer as well.

 

[dhagood]

so our barn has been in use for almost exactly a year now. during the course of the previous year, whenever we've needed to stash something somewhere for some reason, the answer has been "put it in the barn". i mean, why not? people build a barn in order to store stuff, and we've had stuff we've needed to store. a lot of stuff. over the course of the last couple of months, we're now at "too much" stuff. here is the current state of things:

the car on the front left is our "official high mileage vehicle", ie a 2005 vw passat tdi. i'm averaging something like 40.5 miles per gallon in this car, with a high of over 45. what with diesel currently being cheaper than gas in most of the denver area right now, this is a win-win situation. or it would be if i could keep coolant in the vehicle. it's currently dribbling expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. i started poking around and found evidence that the radiator was leaking. not a problem i thought, buy a new aftermarket radiator and install it and yer done. it's really easy getting to the radiator on this car, and the whole job took 4 hours maybe.

see the dried pink froth on the top of the picture. proof the radiator leaks, and now that leak is fixed. it's a crying shame the car is still dribbling expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. it turns out there is a fitted o-ring that seals a plastic cooling system manifold on the back of the head that shrinks and cracks from all the heat cycling and dribbles expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. so i've been working on that.

the semi-shiny thing you see is what vw is pleased to call a tandem pump. it is a combination vacuum pump and high pressure fuel pump, and it is exactly over the plastic cooling system manifold i'm trying to repair. i can't see the manifold at all unless i use a mirror, and the firewall is right in the way. i'm going to have to take the tandem pump off to get reasonable access to things which will dump diesel fuel all over everything. sigh...

back to the barn. my work area is behind the car, and is filled with things i'd like to have elsewhere, like a wheelbarrow which currently contains our big generator. behind the work area and to the right of the ladders is my lumber storage. on the right side of the barn, there is the tractor and behind the tractor and my chop saw is my wife's old volvo s70. the s70 has a problem with coolant getting into the engine oil. normally i would think head gasket, especially on a turbocharged engine, but a gas analysis of the coolant sez there are no combustion by-products in the oil which means it's not the head gasket. that is definitive i'm told, except for the fact the vehicle is using coolant (ie, not being leaked) and there is coolant in the oil. oil cooler? i'd like to work on this car soon. i've been saying that for a year.

between the s70 and my work area is the gator. behind the s70 and gator is generic stuff for which i haven't found a better place. on both sides of the barn are storage racks on which have been placed other stuff that used to be on the barn floor but had to be moved somewhere in order to cram more stuff into the barn. and so it was today. i cranked up the volvo and drove it out of the barn, down the hill, and into the trees because we have still more stuff that we need to put in the barn. not only more stuff, but higher priority stuff than an eighteen year old car.

finally, i worked on tightening up an original fence line and hung one of the gates. once i hang the other gate, i'll have the residential land fenced off from the agricultural land, and it'll be on to the next project.

 

[dhagood]

so i finally have the vw running again. what i basically did is to replace two gaskets on the back of the cylinder head. the total cost for parts was under 20 bucks with shipping. but with one thing after another of changing priorities, changing schedules, and rainy weather it took me something like 10 working hours spread over two full months to complete the task. bah.

no question as to why it leaked...

 

[Par4x4]

I just read your forum start to finish. I retired last November to 41 acres in SW Missouri. I'm getting ready to build a 30'x40'x10' pole barn with three 10'x8' overhead doors. My first purchase, after our house/property, was a Kioti CK4010 HST with FEL and 5' Bush Hog. I've been using the heck out of it and just started grading the barn site. Our property is mostly wooded with oak, hickory and elm. Loved following along with your progress. Keep up the good work and don't forget to enjoy retirement!

 

[dhagood]

thank you kind sir, and congrats on your retirement. please think seriously about starting your own thread about your barn build and other work you do. and if you do start a thread, remember to upload lots of pictures

not much work getting done on the property at the moment, but it is a good year for wild flowers.

one of the things i've been trying to do while out at the property is to take more time and enjoy the surroundings. i spend so much of my time in the future planning, contemplating, and visualizing how things will be tomorrow that i rarely take a moment to enjoy today. there are a number of patches of verdant wildflowers out now, and the valley has turned green with new grass. it's all just lovely, and i need to spend more time in the here and now.

i am still busy as all get out. have i ever mentioned that my wife and i are also renovating the kitchen in our son's condo? i'm going over today to install more cabinets. still working on the house so we can put it on the market of course. and then there's the vehicles. as previously mentioned, i got the passat running. this past tuesday i went to get it emissions tested and the stupid thing threw a fault code in the middle of the test (which means it failed). i think i have tracked it down to the anti-shudder valve which is very easy to replace. my wife's current volvo also has some issues which need to get fixed quickly.

when all that is done, there are a number of sheds and enclosures i need to build, but the big thing this year is drainage. drainage for the road. drainage for the barn. drainage for the parking area. i need lots of drainage, and i don't have any to speak of at the moment.

 

[hawkeye08]

We made the mistake of moving into a 1952 ~32' trailer in the middle of a field. We had no power, no water, no septic and the trailer does not have any holding tanks. We used a portapotty that had to be emptied often and showed and did laundry at friends. We sold our old house and used most of the money to purchase land with not much left over for building so we decided to build house first, then 10 years later got the shop built.

You are doing it right, shop and utilities first, then house. We also had 3 daughters 18months-6 years so it was an adventure for sure.

 

[dhagood]

not much going on at the property since we've been mostly working on getting our current house ready to sell. i did have to spend some time repairing the western fence line to keep some of our neighbor's cows out. that work has also done an admirable job of keeping our cows in.

 

[Green Power]

Nice looking cows. Anything new worth sharing?

 

[dhagood]

i've been meaning to update this thread for quite awhile now, but bad weather, the holidays, and laziness have taken their toll. and thanks for your interest green power, your post helped get me off the dime.

so its been six months or so since my last update. when i seriously started to think about what i could report what i've accomplished i was pretty bummed out at how little i'd gotten done. what this has mostly been is a juggling act, and i can't juggle worth beans.

if you'll remember, i was working on the ranch, our old house in the denver metropolitan area, and my son's condo. one of the things that was not helping my productivity was the amount of driving i was doing. if i worked at the ranch, i'd spend 2.5 hours driving back and forth between the house and the ranch. that certainly isn't terrible, but i drove over 40,000 miles during the past year and never left the state.

another thing that didn't help was tools. i drove my passat whenever i could because it averages 40.9 mpg. the downside of that is there is very limited room for tools. i tried toolboxes. i tried tool buckets. i scoured the internet for ideas. but i never got to the point where i could drive up to any one of my work sites and have all the tools or materials that i needed. i couldn't take everything with me and i couldn't list every tool or material i would need. if i was in town, i could easily buy additional materials. but out at the ranch, the nearest store with any kind of building supplies or tools was 24 miles one way and the nearest home depot is 40 miles one way. doing that once was plenty bad enough, but i had more than one day when i had to make multiple trips like that. i alternated being angry with feeling really stupid when that happened.

so i finally gave up working on the house and the condo. my wife and i hired a contractor to finish our son's condo. there was the standard battle with getting the work you think you are paying for done to a reasonable level of competence, but the condo has a working kitchen now and the carpet should be installed this week. we also hired several contractors to work on the house and that is getting wrapped up as well.

at the ranch, there is no great big project that i did, but a bunch of little stuff that adds up to... a bunch of little stuff being done.

i got the rv situated,

but i'm still working on the skirting. i have some lumber cut for one of the sections but haven't worked on that in weeks.

i got a very small cement slab poured and some decent steps built for entry.

i had the electricians back out to add more circuits to the barn.

once again i thought long and hard about doing that myself and decided there is no way i could do anywhere near as good a job as a professional when it comes to bending the conduit.

i got the gutters up on the west side of the barn

complete with underground water evacuation.

it was a bit tricky figuring out how to hang the last section of gutter at the end. just remember that pop rivets are your friend.

it's been pretty cold here on and off. we had a cold front blow through before christmas that dropped temperatures here on the eastern plains of colorado to -13 degrees fahrenheit. i dropped what i was doing and got a windbreak up for the cows just in the nick of time. it is still obviously a work in progress, but the ground has been frozen to the point where it's hard to do anything else at the moment. it's going to be warming this week and i hope to get back to work and turn the windbreak into a loafing shed.

and thankfully, the cows are hardy beasts, and came through with flying colors.

i have some more progress relating to the inside of the barn to show, but i'll stop this post here. i trust that everybody had a good christmas, and here's wishing everybody a good 2017 (2016 was a little bumpy...).