Catching up to the 21st century, part 4...land, finally

The last "Catching up" post ended with us finding out that our favorite piece of Santa Cruz land was potentially for sale. We made an offer to Ben (Karsten's land partner) in November, 2005. He accepted! A series of counteroffers ensued over the next several weeks until a final offer was arrived at. Due to circumstances outside the scope of this blog, we did not close until December of 2006.

One of the items we had to take care of during that long escrow was to modify the Tenancy In Common (TIC) agreement between Karsten and Ben so that it applied to Karsten, Mike and Cindy. We chose to modify the document Karsten and Ben drafted rather than have an attorney draft a new document. All of the items in a boilerplate TIC agreement were already addressed by Karsten and Ben, so we chose to save the attorney fees. There is a risk in this approach that we chose to accept given our good relations with Karsten. The primary advantage of sharing land ownership under a TIC agreement is the reduction in land cost in areas such as California where even raw land prices are astronomical. TIC agreements are becoming more common in the San Francisco Bay area as property prices become unaffordable to more folks.

Flashback to an important missed item in the chronology:

While Cindy was a Trinity Alps ranger in the Summer of 2004, we became attracted to and started searching for a home in the Eureka area. The twin cities of Eureka and Arcata are on a beautiful stretch of coastline in far northern California. The cities are in close proximity to the Trinity Alps Wilderness which is like a smaller, less populated Sierra Nevada range. Arcata is home to Humboldt State University, so there is a nice college town vibe. After a long search, in March 2005, we closed escrow on a nice turn of the century main home with a small rental above the garage. The idea was to rent out this home while working back in the San Francisco Bay area to pay it off. After reducing the mortgage to zero, we would "retire" to Eureka and live in the main home while renting the apartment above the garage for extra income.We spent a rainy week in March cleaning the place and getting it ready to rent. We hired a property management company to oversee the rental. The garage apartment was already rented, and the main home rented quickly.

Once in escrow on the Santa Cruz property, our plans were to build a home and "retire" there. Since I did not enjoy owning a long distance rental property, we wanted to sell the Eureka rental home. The problem was, the Eureka/Arcata real estate market had already started to fall by early 2006. We put the occupied rental up for sale in early 2006 and hoped for the best.

The first half of 2006 went by with no serious offers on the Eureka home. In the fall of 2006, the tenant moved out of the main home. This gave us an opportunity to clean and properly stage the empty main home for sale. We received one unreasonable offer in the fall. Finally, we decided to paint the exterior and make one more big push to sell the home before pulling it off the market. We accepted an offer in late November, 2006. We closed escrow in December, 2006, just weeks apart from closure of the Santa Cruz escrow. Our land search was over! Almost 5 years after falling in love with Santa Cruz on paper, I owned dirt there. Be careful what you wish for.

A word about professionals:

Our real estate agent, Mikki Cardoza, did a great job marketing the property throughout the year in a difficult market. I would highly recommend Mikki if you are looking for real estate in the Eureka/Arcata market. By the way, our real estate agent in Redondo Beach is also excellent. Her name is Paula Oliver, and I would highly recommend her if you need a Southern California real estate agent. Cindy and I represented ourselves for the Santa Cruz land purchase. We had already been through 5 real estate transactions and were familiar with the contracts and process. We downloaded a land purchase agreement from Reveal Systems and prepared it ourselves. This process worked for us and Ben (the seller). We learned that realtors work for their commission. We also learned that the effort was manageable and worth our time for the thousands in commission we saved. In my opinion, the property management service received was not worth the commission I paid. I will never again own a long distance rental. My personality requires more involvement with management activities.

To be continued...

Catching up to the 21st century, part 3...finding our land the 1st time

The last "Catching up" chapter had me getting an offer from Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO in late 2003. Cindy was concerned about the move to Boulder, so Mike searched for work in northern CA and found a job at Phonic Ear (now Front Row) in Petaluma. We found a nice rental home on the West side with a 4 mile bike/walk to Phonic Ear. It was a turn of the century home redone with a nice open great room and 12 foot ceilings – a foreshadowing of what we would like to design into our “dream home”. We had another garage sale and packed up the remaining stuff again. We hired a mover to take us down to Petaluma towards the end of February, 2004.

During the summer of 2003, Cindy and I tried unsuccessfully to become volunteer backcountry rangers in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park. While on a backpacking trip in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, we ran into Jim Holmes who runs the Trinity Alps Wilderness volunteer program. We told Jim about our inability to become volunteers in Sequoia. He said he would take either of us as volunteers in his program. In early 2004, Cindy took Jim up on the offer. She spent much of the spring in 2004 training and preparing for her summer as a backcountry ranger. She had the time of her life that summer and brought back some beautiful images and memories.

We spent much of the fall in 2004 discussing what to do about settling down. The housing bubble continued to expand in CA. Homes and land seemed to be getting more expensive every day. We searched in and around Petaluma for real estate, but did not find anything that moved us. We were a bit frustrated. Cindy started contract work at Symantec in the fall of 2004. She figured whatever we decided to do next, it would require more money (smart girl).

In December, 2004, the Santa Cruz Cohousing Yahoo group message board had a listing for four approximately 2.5 acre parcels close to downtown Santa Cruz. Cindy and I went down to visit the land and meet the person arranging the deal - Karsten. We fell in love with the 2 sunny parcels. Several parties were interested in purchasing the land. All of the interested folks were eco-friendly freaks like me and Cindy. We attended a meeting with these people a week later and were excited with the prospect of joining a group of like-minded greenies. We started gathering information related to purchasing raw land. The land would not be not cheap, and we were quickly stressing over the pluses and minuses of living in Santa Cruz. When in love, however, rationality goes out the window.

The deal was days away from closing, and all 4 parcels were still not spoken for. I think everyone involved was pretty stressed out. The 2 parcels we were most interested in were already taken, so we asked our green builder friend Estok Menton to visit the land with us to assess the feasibility of building on the remaining 2 parcels. Although the lots were buildable according to Estok, we were not interested enough for the amount of money involved. After sleeping on it a few more days, we backed out. The group eventually found enough buyers and closed the deal.

We spent much of 2005 going through the motions, earning money for some eventual land or home purchase. We were still very interested in Santa Cruz. There was a 2003 article called "healthy cities" in Organic Style magazine. The article references a 1997 report called Rating Guide to Environmentally Healthy Metro Areas. In this report, Santa Cruz ranked 109 of 317 metro areas in the US, and it was the highest rated area in California. Although this report is old, the criteria are thorough and can be searched for current data. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to research cities in the US.

In the fall of 2005, we contacted Karsten (the guy who arranged the aforementioned land purchase) to see what the real estate market was like in Santa Cruz. Surprisingly, he said that his land partner (Ben) was thinking of selling his share of the land. Karsten and Ben's parcel was the one we liked the most. It was the one on which our builder friend Estok said "This is where I would build my house". We contacted Ben, and he confirmed that he was interested in selling. The land was giving us a second opportunity, and we were not going to let it get away this time.

To be continued...

Portable Sawmill

It was time to turn the logs into rough cut lumber for later use in and around the new home. I hired Dave Smith (831-234-8407) and his portable sawmill to do the job. This type of mill is essentially a large band saw on a linear slide mounted to a trailer for driving most anywhere your vehicle can take you. Dave and his son Everett arrived early on a cool morning in mid December. Here's a pic of them setting up the portable mill.

This sawmill has hydraulic manipulators for positioning and clamping the logs. Dave was an expert user of his mill - it looked like the machine was an extension of his hand. Here's a video of the manipulators in action.

Dave spent the better part of the daylight hours slicing logs up into various thicknesses depending on the type of wood and final expected use. Everett moved every piece off the mill, temporarily stacked it up for later, and got new logs ready to load onto the mill. Here's a pic of the mill making sawdust, a video of the redwood log being cut followed by a pic of a 6x6 redwood post.

The final step is setting the wood up to dry in layers separated by thin pieces of wood called stickers - a process called sticking. Unfortunately, the best drying location and the best location to set up the mill were about 50 feet apart. This meant we had to move all the rough cut wood uphill to the new location, whew. A small level foundation was made from pieces of leftover oak, paving blocks and redwood shims. In the final pic you see Cindy standing next to the stack.

Water moves longitudinally many times faster than radially in trees. Cindy is busy painting the ends of the wood with latex. This reduces the amount of water coming out of the ends resulting in a more uniform drying process. More uniform drying means fewer and smaller cracks in the dried wood. Wood takes about 1 year per inch thickness to dry naturally in the air (more about wood drying). Since most of this wood is about 1 3/4" thick, it will be almost 2 years before it is ready to use.

Dave and Everett did an awesome job with one really cool machine. I would highly recommend calling Dave if you live near Santa Cruz and need some wood milled at your site.

Tree Removal

Keith Omer of Pacific Mountain Tree Service (831-338-7565) cut down Big Oak tree in November, chopped the smaller branches and brush into mulch and cut the medium size branches into firewood. He then used a stump grinder to turn the stump into a fine mulch.

Keith staged the larger logs on the relatively flat spot of ground in front of where the new home will be built. My neighbor had some blackwood acacia trees blow down during a severe storm last winter. Keith pulled these trees out with his portable crane and staged them with the oak logs. Finally, Keith pulled out some redwood logs that had been under a brush pile for several years and staged them with the rest of the logs. The stack of logs is now set up for milling.

Keith did a great job. I would highly recommend Pacific Mountain Tree Service for tree removal and getting logs out of tough places.

giving thanks

Just a short post today thanking those wonderful folks who played a part in my home design. My home will be a better place because of their efforts and influence. THANKS!

Joshua Drews of Eco-Logical Design, my design consultant
Cindy Grall, my better half
Bob Hollen, my brother-in-law
Marc Levine of All Ears Audio, my audio consultant
Estok Menton of Menton Builders, a builder friend
Mitch Slade of Eco-struction, my builder

Goodbye to Big Oak

Well, there has been no interest in adoption of the big oak tree. I'm not too surprised since it would be very expensive to relocate, and the odds of survival were low. I'm having the tree cut down this week, so I said my goodbyes last weekend and took these pics :-(

All of the material will remain on site and serve a purpose. The large branches and trunk will be rough milled and stacked to dry. Eventually this lumber will become finish wood in the new home. The twigs and stump will be turned into mulch.

Adopt a Tree...

I've had one thing nagging me during the entire design phase of my home. There is a beautiful oak tree living right in the center of the only sensible place to build. I have tried to rationalize building the home where the tree lives:

• the home would be a heating energy hog if built in the shade of the tree
  
• the home will act like a tree by catching and storing water, be the center of a beautiful garden, provide a healthy living space...
  
• other trees were cut down on this land to create a building area before I purchased
• the land is blessed with many other beautiful trees
• I will plant more than enough trees on the land to make up for this one tree
• wood from the tree will become parts of the home

Regardless of these rationalizations, I still get sad when I think about cutting it down. That's why I was excited to learn about tree relocation. Companies like J. Arnaz Tree Movers in San Jose, CA are able to successfully relocate large trees from one place to another.

I am searching for someone to adopt this tree. I will give the tree to anyone who pays all expenses to relocate the tree. This would be an expensive and difficult process, and it is not guaranteed to be successful. It is a 24" caliper live oak, over 30' tall and over 35' in diameter. The tree is located in Santa Cruz, CA. Please comment with your contact information or email me if you are seriously interested in pursuing this further. Thanks!

Finding land...you never know where the lead will come from

Soon after realizing we would not find land meeting our needs in Northern California, I learned about cohousing groups. The basic idea is that a group of people form some type of partnership or corporation for the purpose of purchasing and holding land or existing housing. The group usually has a common desire to become a community with a shared organic garden and periodic shared meals. Cohousing is usually designed a bit denser than typical single family homes resulting in either lower cost or increased quality. Cindy and I liked the concept, so I got on the email list for the Santa Cruz Cohousing group. Cindy and I attended a meeting in 2003 and read up on the forum history for the group.

Cohousing ultimately did not work out for us. However, I kept my subscription to the email list and still do to this day. I learn about great speakers that are visiting the area as well as terrific home and garden tours. The most rewarding result of staying on that mailing list was learning about a parcel of land that was for sale to a group of like minded green building folks.

I'll tell the whole story about the Santa Cruz land in another post. The purpose of this post is to inspire you to try anything when looking for land on which to build your dream green home. You never know where your lead will come from. The idea is to let as many people as possible know about your land search. The bigger your network, the more likely a golden lead will find its way to you. Some things that should be part of your land search:

• Of course, you should have a good Realtor looking for you.
  
• Tell everyone you know that you are looking for land.
• Tell people you don't know that you are looking for land - use it as a conversation ice breaker.
  
• Sign up for a cohousing email list or newsgroup - this is what worked for me.
  
• If you see land you like, find out who owns it and make contact. You never know if they may want to sell to you.
  

I'd love to hear about how you found your land or interesting ways you are searching. Go ahead, leave a comment!

Catching up to the 21st century, part 2...country living complete with wood burning stove

A township outside Willits is Brooktrails, 4 miles west of town up in the redwoods. Brooktrails has a small market, a video store and several hundred homes - about ½ of which are vacation homes. The creek going through the valley is dammed off to form a reservoir that supplies water for the homes. Water is very cheap per SCF, but the flat rate fee for access to the water is large because the reservoir silts over and needs to be dredged every few years.

We found an 850 sq-ft rental home that is owned by the same guy who opened the local natural foods market >20 years earlier. We signed a lease and planned our escape from the “rat race”. We packed all our stuff ourselves into a 17 foot moving van and drove up to Brooktrails in June of 2003. Some of the highlights:

- Living among the trees was great with peacocks, turkey & deer going through the yard every day.

- Living 4 miles out of town having to drive a steep & heavily traveled narrow road was not so great for my tastes.

- We were living without TV (other than movies) for the first time. I didn’t miss it a bit.

- We were paying off our sleep debt. With no alarms, we were sleeping 9-10 hours a night for weeks in a row. "Sleep Thieves" by Stanley Coren is an excellent book about sleep. Mr Coren also wrote another excellent book that we are partial to, both being left handers - "The Left Hander Syndrome".

- We discovered local community sponsored radio at KZYX. We volunteered for one of the KZYX fund drives and met some fun, dedicated and interesting folks.

- I started spending hours a day surfing the web, looking for real estate and researching natural building. Ultimately, stumbling along the cohousing topic would have a huge payoff.

- The home had a wood stove. We purchased a cord of wood in July and stacked it out to season over the summer. Check out woodheat.org for some great wood burning tips. We really enjoyed the radiant heat provided by the wood stove. Being a pyromaniac at heart, I really enjoyed starting a fire most every day over the winter. The place had backup electric wall heaters which we did not want to use unless absolutely necessary. The place had an electric water heater that the landlord replaced with a propane on demand water heater.

- The week before Thanksgiving in 2003, I played drums in the Ukiah Brewery open mic night. I met Estok Menton, CEO of Menton Builders that night. Besides being an awesome natural home builder, Estok also sings and plays a pretty mean guitar. Estok invited me over to play with his band the following night. I practiced nearly every week and eventually played out several times with the band. The members are my good friends, and I still keep in contact with them to this day.

- Searching around the Willits/Ukiah area for raw land made us soon realize that there was none within our budget closer than 15 miles from town. Living in Brooktrails made us realize that our desire is to live in the woods, but near an easily accessible town. Althoug we enjouyed our stay in the Willits/Ukiah area, it would not be the place where we set down roots.

- In August of 2003, my mom died. A road trip to get away and soul search ensued soon after in late September to early October. This was a truncated version of a road trip we had planned to take from CA all the way back to IL/WI to visit family. We saw our families around the time of the funeral in Aug/Sep which meant we would not drive any further East than the Rocky Mountains on this road trip. The plan was the same as for the California coastal trip in my last post - check out the cities as potential places to settle. The trip went from Brooktrails to Boulder, CO and included the following stops:

Sparks, NV - last little/big city before Black rock City and Burning Man
Salt Lake City, UT
Boulder, CO - fantastic outdoor college town, one of my top 3
Denver, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
Durango, CO
Moab, UT - spoke deeply to the mountain biker in me

The trip showed us amazing scenery. Unfortunately, we could not find significant multi-day backpacking trails - we are very spoiled to have the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. However, Boulder was an awesome town with beautiful scenery, hiking trails, biking trails and rock climbing all outside the backdoor. The Ball Aerospace Corporation has a division that develops space satellites in Boulder. They interviewed me and made a job offer.

To be continued....

catching up to the 21st century, part 1: Los Angeles, to northern CA

1999: In August, my wife and I moved to a nice condo in Redondo Beach, CA.

2000: My wife's repetitive strain injury reached a breaking point. She was concerned about the future of a “career” if she could not type. She changed jobs in August to work for a former colleague who understood her need to take it easy on the arms. I was very concerned for her health.

Late 2000/early 2001: The early rumblings of a change in lifestyle. As we were cleaning our 2000 sq-ft condo one day, we realized it had too much space and we had too much “stuff”.

2000: My father died, 2001: 9/11. Two unrelated events that changed my views towards life forever.

April 2002: My wife and I decided to go on a 10-day road trip up the California coast. I was starting to think about other places in CA I may want to eventually live/settle/”retire” to. I read a book on coastal CA cities and fell in love on paper with Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz (foreshadowing). These cities became the bookends of the trip. I mapped out farmer’s markets, parks, libraries, whole foods stores and vegetarian restaurants. The idea was to get a quick feel for the cities and real estate markets during the visit and see if the places were a fit for our lifestyle. The plan was to go up as far North as Santa Cruz and stop in Santa Barbara on the return home. We saw good friends along the way at Hearst Castle. These friends like visiting Big Sur every summer - a good reason to settle in Santa Cruz since Big Sur is only about 1 hr away.

I read “Cannery Row” to get a feel for the wharf in Monterey and watched “Citizen Kane” to get a feel for Hearst castle.

Stops along the way:

Buellton/Solvang (of “Sideways” fame)
Santa Maria
Arroyo Grande
Pismo Beach
San Louis Obispo
Atascadero, Paso Robles (wine country)
Morro Bay
Cambria
San Simeon (Hearst Castle)
Pfeiffer Big Sur state park
Carmel
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Seaside
Watsonville (artichokes)
Aptos
Capitola
Santa Cruz
Felton
Ben Lomond,
Boulder Creek
Scotts Valley

We stayed at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Felton in the Santa Cruz mountains. I hiked among redwoods for the first time. I enjoyed the beauty of the area and the higher green space and more limited development compared to Los Angeles. I ate a delicious veggie meal at Dharma’s, yum!

The return drive was on Easter weekend, so all of the places to stay in Santa Barbara were booked. We had to check out Santa Barbara one weekend later. We looked at apartments within the rent budget limit at the time, but no places were appealing. I was left with a longing for Santa Cruz and places to the north.

May, 2002: My wife's company decided to close their Los Angeles office and offered to move us to the Bay area. Coincidence?...I think not.

June, 2002: We began to pack up the house. We had a multi-day yard sale to unload much of our excess stuff. We met many interesting people, and even sold some items which were headed for the trash can. We had tearful goodbyes with longtime friends, then we drove north to our future.

July, 2002: We moved to a nice rental home near downtown Palo Alto, CA. The city has an awesome library system. We started reading “simplicity” books. We read “Your Money or your Life”. I didn't find work immediately, so I volunteered at Hidden Villa for the Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA). It was a really powerful experience, with amazingly cool people. I started seriously thinking about early “retirement”. My wife was not happy with her work environment. Like most companies during the dot bomb years, layoffs and bad morale were as rampant as the irrational exuberance leading up to the bust. Also, repetitive strain was still nagging her, preventing her from doing one of her favorite hobbies – quilting.

I started working at Space Systems Loral (arch enemy of my former employer, Boeing Satellite Systems) in late October, 2002. I began crunching monthly budget numbers. I shifted investments to Government Agency bonds (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) to capture a known income stream. I arrived at a reasonable monthly budget funded by the bond investments leaving a chunk of cash available to buy land and build a small home somewhere in Northern California. I started reading about natural homes/building a home/living rural off the grid/green building/gardening. Some of the best:

How to Find Your Ideal Country Home: A Comprehensive Guide - a terrific source of information even if you are not planning to live in the country

The Art of Natural Building - the place to start for reading about natural building

The Strawbale Home - what gets most folks excited about strawbale homes

Golden Gate Gardening - awesome source even if you don't garden next to the Golden Gate Bridge

2002: Searching for a place to settle. We love backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains so we would love to live close by on the eastern slope in either Bishop, Lone Pine or Mammoth Lakes. Unfortunately, the climate is extremely dry so there is little water for farming. I could not find organic foods in Bishop or Lone Pine. Mammoth has a natural foods store, but it also has a significant winter - hence the great skiing. I shoveled my share of snow growing up in Wisconsin, so I will pass on a retirement filled with white Christmases.

We took a road trip up Interstate 5 from the San Francisco Bay area to Redding. The central valley is either too barren for my tastes (Stockton), too hot for my tastes (Redding) or too dirty from agriculture blowoff and 5 freeway traffic (Visalia/Three Rivers).

We took road trip up highway 101. Heading north over the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco takes you through Marin and Sonoma counties. These are very beautiful areas. However, being fairly developed, they lack in raw land within our price range.

North of Santa Rosa, highway 101 opens up to, for the most part, relatively undeveloped land for the remainder of the state. Ukiah and Eureka being the 2 major exceptions. This is in stark contrast to Southern California, which will someday be one long suburb along the coast. It is understandable that people continue to flock to Southern CA given the superb climate. The question is, how sustainable is the development? Mendocino county saw its share of the “back to the land movement" in the 60’s/70's. The hills to the east of Willits became home for many off-the-grid dwellers creating a need for PV and wind power systems. This movement combined with the desire to smoke a doobie combined to form the beginnings of the solar and wind power industry in America. The marijuana growers had money and needed power for their homes.

We visited Hopland, home of the Solar Living Institute and Real Goods retail store for the first time in September, 2002. We were jazzed about the strawbale store being cool without air conditioning on the 100+ degree Fahrenheit day. We toured the grounds and enjoyed the pond and organic garden that the interns tended. We spoke with 2 of the interns about their experiences and started to consider interning as an opportunity to gain experience in building an alternative home.

Just north of Hopland is the soaring metropolis of Ukiah ;-). Ukiah has an awesome grocery store called, imagine that, “Ukiah Natural Foods”. Rents in Ukiah were a bit too high for our "early retirement" budget. The city of Willits sits a little further "up the hill" like a suburb of Ukiah. Willits (of “Seabiscuit” fame) is a great town:

- nice library
- Purple Thistle - a great organic restaurant
- Shanachie Pub - a must stop on the 101 for an organic beer or wine

A pub is a good place to stop a post that is too long already.