Our New Mountainside Home

October 2006

Although it's not new in the sense that it was built more than 25 years ago, this is a new home to us, and while it isn’t exactly what we were looking for, we were very grateful to find it, as it will work. We had actually given up hope of finding anything at all this year, or perhaps that we could ever afford, when the Lord put this one right in front of us, and I awoke one day with the strong urge to DO something about finding a house, and here this one appeared, after more than 1-1/2 years of looking! It’s small, but has just enough room, it doesn’t have as much land as we were looking for, but has enough for what we need; it needs some updating, but nothing earth-shaking, so… in His infinite wisdom, the Lord provided just what we needed, whether we knew it or not, or asked for this particular thing. One of the best things is that Jim can literally step out the door and do some gold prospecting, and can dredge for gold just a little more than a mile away if he wants. That’s very handy!

We began moving in the last week of August, but we had a lot of company most of the time since, ending just a week ago, so we are still not settled completely, although it is getting better.

Basically, the house is a one-story, two bedroom, one bath home with an attached two-car garage. It’s on a little less than ½ acre, has a circle driveway, and space to store our camping trailer and Jim’s mining gear. It has a long covered porch, and an uncovered, raised deck outside the living room. Fenced (against the deer) garden area in front, it has well forested land, and sits in the middle of a national forest.

In the photo at right you can see that we don't have a picket fence, but it's close, and this is actually better for the deer, as picket fences are shorter. In this photo I'm viewing the garden while resting against the fence after climbing around on the mountain. I don't "do" mountains well. To the right of this photo is our front porch, the deck is in the distance in front of me, and I'm counting to find that there are ten rose bushes in the garden along with a whole lot of weeds.

We also have a small creek just behind the house, where our water supply comes from. I know that's unusual in these days, but we are quite "rustic" here, and we had the water tested before we bought the house. It failed the test, so the seller offered to have a new, state-of-the-art ultraviolet light filtering system installed. These systems have several pre-filters to remove all sediment, metals and other impurities, so the water will be clear for the light to destroy any bacteria or viruses that might be present. The nearby store (just one house away) sells ice made from this water filtered with this system and is regularly tested for purity and found to be pure. The water is great now, and from the creek it flows into a small pump house where it is filtered and stored in a tank before being pumped into the house. This water system (well, the creek anyway) dates back to the 1860's, when there was a gold rush here, and water was diverted from three small creeks to form this one. All residents here have water rights to it, and still use it in some manner, even if only for irrigation. The small, quaint cemetery just up the road a ways dates back to 1867.

I first saw this area in 1979, I believe, when camped at a nearby campground, I walked down to this same store with a friend, and fell in love with it at that time. I must have walked past this same house, but don't remember it. I have no idea what it even looked like at that time. It is a pretty area, and some spots have a lot of wild vines like grapes, blackberry, and others, so thick they cover nearby trees. These are found only in very open areas with a lot of sunshine, however. There are also lovely California redbud trees linking some areas of the highway here, and in spring they are absolutely beautiful. In fact, we took photos of them this last spring, as we came through on our way to town at the peak of their bloom.

Photo above: A couple of the California Redbuds that grow here, taken May 2006

Other than the fenced garden area, the landscaping here is what's called "natural," meaning that there is none, to speak of. The front of the property and the west side have large, mostly old-growth cedar (I don't know exactly what they are yet, "cedar" can mean a variety of trees here) like those seen at the left rear of the garden photo at the top of the page that I'm in. The first time we stepped out of the truck here it was quite warm still, and the air was heavily perfumed with the wonderful scent of these trees. That has faded as the weather has cooled, but it instantly made us like the place. There are some redwoods mixed in with them, and some madrone, mostly small ones, and a few others. There are no flowers anywhere, because the deer evidently ate everything they planted. There are some things they usually ignore here, however, and I'll try some of those things outside the fence.

Neither of us has ever lived on a mountainside before, and Jim says our property is situated mostly about 100 feet above the highway below. While we are perched, we are not "precariously" perched. Our house sits firmly on bedrock, attested to by a foundation that has no cracks, and the outcroppings of bedrock that dot our landscape.

Some of the other things we love about the house are:

The ceilings in the living room and bedrooms are vaulted up to about 15 feet, with pine tongue and groove boards that have a whitewash or “pickled” finish to them, and each of these rooms also has a ceiling fan to push the heat back down and re-circulate warm air.
The living room has a new, 8-ft. sliding glass door leading out to the deck with a nice view of our garden and the mountainside scenery beyond.
The master bedroom has a 6-ft. sliding glass door to the forest in back, and the creek. This room also has a 13 foot long closet, and the space above is recessed and open, with up-lights, creating a wonderful place to put a display. I will have to photograph this, as it is difficult to explain.
Each of the bedrooms has one wall in which the ceiling paneling has been extended down the wall to the floor, which is a nice touch.
The garage is nice and spacious, has built-in storage, and a work area for Jim.
The kitchen has a walk-in pantry that is small and narrow, but holds an amazing amount of foodstuffs.

The view from the guest bedroom windows... As you can see, we ARE in the midst of forest, and it is a beautiful one. The large tree in the center of the window is a "coast redwood." The wood paneling on the right is a continuation of what's on the ceiling in both bedrooms, and in the living room.

Some of the things we don’t love about it are:

It looks like they added the garage after the home was built, and the configuration of rooms in the kitchen area doesn’t work real well, but we’re still trying to figure out what we want to do with it, because of the hot water heater placement. There is a small entry area when you come in the front door, but you are facing an open “room” that is just about 5 ft. by 7 ft. holding only the hot water heater, out in the open. There is an entrance door to the garage in this room. It would seem a good area to locate a mudroom, but the problem with this is that there is no defined area for dining except for an eating bar on the living room side of the dividing wall between kitchen and living room.
The living room is square, 16 feet per side, which seemed large enough, but with the big sliding door on one wall, the heating stove in the center of another, and this dining bar on a third wall, furniture placement is awkward, especially because we have 10-12 ft. of computer desks and tables in the living room. Since we spend a lot of time using our computers, we want them in the living room.
The space taken by the configuration now of the entry, kitchen, laundry space, walk-in pantry, and this strange little room (we call it the "odd" room) is about 16 ft. square, also. We’ve thought about removing walls and opening it all up to make a large kitchen with pantry storage and laundry, but haven’t made any decision yet. Because the hot water heater would be in the middle of the floor it would have to be moved, most likely to the garage, since it is close by. A lot of plumbing would have to be moved, including the washer/dryer plumbing.
We want to live in it awhile before we make any decision on this, since so much time and investment would be involved, and we’re finding out so far that while the kitchen is small, it is arranged efficiently, and we’re just not sure we want to tackle that at this time in our lives.
The kitchen cabinets have to be updated, as they have large Spanish hardware right in the middle of the doors and drawers, and the finish is in poor condition. However, once the hardware is removed, the doors themselves should be fine if they were painted, and that’s all we plan to do, other than to put glass in some of the upper doors.
The kitchen countertop needs updated, but we are still trying to decide what we want to do with it. We’re considering having more than one finish, with something that withstands heat in the stove area.
We want to update the kitchen faucet, and possibly the sinks.
The kitchen has no dishwasher, and we want to add one, and the stove has never been replaced, and definitely needs it. It was a good stainless stove, but has outlived it’s life.
The living room, kitchen, entry, bath, halls, pantry, odd room; all these floors have to be replaced. The living room is 70’s orange/brown mix carpet, and we want wood. All the other floors are vinyl, and original to the house. It is cracked in several places, the pattern is of orange brick, and it all has to go.
In addition to the living room floor we would like to add two windows to the east wall of the house, to admit sunlight. Right now the sliding door and the one window are on the north side, so we get no direct sunlight in the house, since the south side is shaded by forest, there are no west side windows because the garage is on that side, and there are none on the east side. Two tall windows on that wall of the living room would really make the room seem more spacious and bright. In a former life Jim was a glazier, with his own glass business, so putting them in is not a problem.
The bedroom carpet needs replaced, too, but I don’t see that happening until later.

The heat in the house is something different than we’ve seen. It looks like a regular woodstove, but it is oil, called a “Kuma” stove, and is made in Idaho. It says it will heat a 2,000 sf home, and we believe it! It works very well so far, although we’ve only been able to use it for about half-hour at a time, as that’s all the time it needs to heat the house.

This house must have very good insulation everywhere, because it holds the heat well, as it did the coolness of night, in summer. Even cooking a small dinner now raises the heat in the living room a couple of degrees, and it will hold that heat until early the next morning.

Both bedrooms have electric baseboard heat, with each unit having its own thermostat. We’ve heard they are expensive, but we have each set on as low as it will go, just to keep the bedrooms from getting too cold.

The bathroom has a heating coil unit in the ceiling, so you can turn it on when you get out of the shower, and that’s sufficient so far. In fact, you don’t want to turn it on until you get out of the shower, because it heats the small room very quickly.

The bathroom is quite small, but does have a small vanity with drawers, and with a wall unit we plan to get for above the toilet, that should be sufficient for storage in there. There is a small linen closet just across the hall from the bath, which works for towels and blanket storage, but sheets will be kept in each respective bedroom closet, since there’s a lot of closet shelf space.

Both bedrooms are fairly good size, and we like that. They are about the same size, give or take a few inches, and are about 13 feet by 14 feet, with the master having a much larger closet.

The second bedroom will serve as guest bedroom, sewing and workroom for me, library, and storage for office supplies and files, so it needs to be large! I still don’t have everything put away in this room, but think it will all work out okay.

The deck outside the living room is small, and we do so much barbecuing and outside entertaining in the summer we plan to add to it next spring, as some of the supports for it need replaced, as well. We are going to widen it about 4 feet, and lengthen it to cover the entire wall, and connect up with the front porch at the house entry, so you can walk the entire front of the house and go to the deck straight from the driveway without having to enter the house, or go clear around it to gain access. This will give us the entertaining space we need, and will be a welcome addition to our living area for summertime, since we don’t have space for entertaining in back.

I’m not going to go into the gardening on this page, as that will have its own section. I want to record the gardening in detail, so I’m already working on a gardening journal.

The outside of the house is in need of paint, and the garden fence needs help, but those are projects for next spring, at the earliest, since we have very wet winters here.

Other outside projects will include repairs to the pump house and fencing, and limbing up the trees on the property and cleaning up waste under them, all a severe fire hazard we can’t afford in this area.

Jim has already completed one project, even with all the other things he's had to do. We have a cat named Missy, and while we love her dearly, she is an inside cat, and we don’t love the cat litter box. As we pondered over where we would put it in this house, Jim came up with a great idea, and that was to build a box in the garage, against the common wall between our odd room (we keep calling it that, for some reason) and the garage. He put a hinged top on the box, and made it large enough to hold her large cat litter box, and an entry. He put a step down to the cement floor, and covered the step and floor with entrance mat material. He then cut a hole in the wall just large enough for Missy to go through easily.

At first we were concerned it might be a problem, because when he put Missy down on the floor in front of it, she felt the cold, damp air coming from this big black hole, and she put her ears back and ran the other way, not stopping until she was under our bed! I asked Jim if putting a light in there was out of the question… he said it was.

By the end of the day Missy was keeping her legs crossed, and when Jim found her sitting in the middle of the bathroom floor with her ears back (we just imagined what she was thinking, since she never sits in the bathroom), he went out to the garage and dug around until he came up with an adjustable arm desk lamp, and installed in her box. That gave her light, and the warmth from the bulb cut down on the cool air… problem solved. I asked him if he wanted me to prepare a candlelight dinner for her in there, but he didn’t see the humor in that. Anyway, his project solved a messy problem for us, he can empty it quickly and easily by lifting the lid from inside the garage, and the only other thing that has happened is that little black crickets were drawn to the light, and were coming into the house from there at night, giving Missy something to play with. As it has cooled, however, they have gone away.

Missy really likes the house, and loves to lie on our bed during the day so she can watch the squirrels scampering around in the forest as they store up food for the coming winter. It’s a nice big window, and she also loves to lie on the floor next to the larger slider in the living room while she looks out at the squirrels and birds from there. We have a few feeders up for birds, and actually still have hummingbirds coming to our hummingbird feeder, which has surprised us. Some nights are down into the 30’s now, and we thought they’d all be gone by this time.

Jim also has plans to add to the storage in the garage, but has to do some “shoring” up before he gets started with that. He brought along the small wood stove he bought while we were in Oregon, and plans to set that up in this garage so he can heat it in the winter. First, however, we have to sell the washer, dryer and refrigerator that were in this house, as they are taking up valuable space in the garage. They were all pretty new, but we like ours better, so we will sell these. I think we may run into a problem with the refrigerator, however. So far we keep filling it up with "stuff," and we’ll have to stop that if we’re going to sell it! We're really happy to have the garage attached to the house, since we get a lot of rain in the winter here (about 50 inches or so), and it will make getting into the house a lot easier, if we can get "up" the driveway to it all the time. It is a steep drive up, and we're not sure how well we can negotiate it, because we don't know how much ice we'll have. We do have 4WD, but in some ice that doesn't help. We do have two places we can park at the bottom of the drive, if necessary, and then walk up (assuming we can walk on it). We are used to walking on ice and snow after living in Alaska's interior, where winters are at their coldest, and it is not a constant thing in this area, so it will just be a new adventure for us.

Well, that should give you a fair picture of what our home is like now, in the "before" stage. I think I will add an index and individual pages as I work on rooms in the house, making changes. I'll try to take photos to illustrate it all well, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

In the meantime, I'm just getting over a big allergy attack that laid me low, so I'm kicking back working on these pages, my garden plan, and joining Missy, the cat, in seeing what's going on outside, while staying warm and toasty inside. Ah me, it's a hard job, but someone's got to do it, and I'm soooooo... very thankful that the Lord has provided such a wonderful place for us!