House Hunting

Day 7 – Cottonwood, AZ

Found my Happy Place! I didn’t even think there’d be one here in a small town in northern Arizona. I went to get my haircut at Great Clips, and on the way I passed right by a combo Dunkin/Baskin Robbins. Guess where I went after?

Looks like 981 W On The Greens is the winner. Turns out the new 1072 Nelson Place doesn’t have a space for a dining area, and this is a deal breaker. The first furniture that Donna and I bought when we got married in 1976 was a rattan dining set: a table, four armchairs, a sideboard/buffet thing, and a hutch that have followed us ever since. Now I just need to figure out how I’m going to buy it.

This afternoon’s entertainment was a visit to Jerome, AZ, that is less than 10 miles from Cottonwood. It was a boomtown in the late 1800s and early 1900s when copper was discovered in the mountains there. In the ’50s the mine closed, and it became a virtual ghost town. A resurgence happened in the ’70s when artists discovered the place. They have turned the old high school’s 3 buildings into places for artists to open small shops. I bought a future Christmas present for someone in one shop and a digitally manipulated bicycle print for myself.

But the real reason I was there was to visit a spot that I can’t believe isn’t listed on Roadside America’s website, The Skullatorium: Skull Museum and Oddities Parlor. A kid at ten years old found an intact coyote skull and brought it home; it became an obsession. There are over 1500 real skulls on display. There are also a lot of oddities, including a couple of “alien” skulls, a display of miniature 3-D printed skulls, and other weird things. As my favorite Vulcan would say, “Fascinating.”

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 91.4%

 

Day 6 – Cottonwood, AZ

House Hunting Day Two. Viewing just the 2 places in the older section today and like yesterday, I eliminated half of the houses looked at.

First stop was 840W On The Greens, and I liked how it was painted in my favorite color, blue, but it sort of went downhill from there. It felt very dated in a weird way even though the home was built in 2006. It has the toilet in its own little room, like normal bodily functions were somehow shameful. And the online photos omitted a view of the wall your living room furniture faced because they knew it was negative. And it became its downfall with me. It had 5 recesses, two-one-two, and that middle place where the TV would go was probably as wide as you needed back in 2006, 36″ or maybe 40″.

981 W On The Greens was the keeper of the day. It too, in some ways, felt a little dated, built in 2007, but in different and less off-putting ways as the one up the street. It is brown, which really is more suited for the desert vibe. It had little decks in front and back. The front is for watching your neighbors go by, and they’ll be going by because the house is one home away from the community center. The back has a view of mountains and some of the golf course that I’ll never use.

When I got back to the AirBnB, I tossed out two of yesterday’s three newer places. Texted the agent and asked if we could go back one more time because I’d like to see that new place, 1072 Nelson Place again and then go right back to the older 981 On The Greens home and pick one. The new home is kind of a blank canvas inside and out, but that might be fun to personalize. The only negatives are it is $10k more initially, and there is zero view on the back deck, just the back deck of the house opposite it.

Stay tuned…

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 92.8%

 

Day 5 – Cottonwood, AZ

House Hunting Day. Below is a copy of my report I emailed to Santa Fe Sally:

Ok, looked at six places and eliminated 3 right off the bat. I didn’t take pictures, but I’ll link the Zillow page for them.

The most expensive at $299,900, which is really more than I want to pay. Probably why the price is what it is: there is nobody behind it, and nothing will be built there because there is a wide wash and then a 2-lane road. 635 Couples Drive

The next two are in the mid $200k range and practically neighbors. They are both 2/2 but they have a possible 3rd bedroom (AKA no closet): 1072 Nelson Place and 1082 Nelson Place. Both of these are brand new; Couples was occupied.

All these places are in the newer section of the community. I think I’d rather be in the older section, so I’ve asked the realtor to get me in a couple over there tomorrow. Her actual office is in Sedona, but it turns out she lives across the highway from the community in real houses that are like $4-500k, so she had no problem with a repeat visit. Both are on W On the Green, 981 and 840. 981 is similar to 635 Couples in that there is and will not be anything behind it.

For those of you who might be keeping track of the status of the Red Sox’s chances of getting to the wild card round of the playoffs, you’ve noticed that the number took a dive compared to yesterday. This is not a bad thing because their chances of getting in the playoffs went up because their chance on winning the division and getting a first-round bye has gone from 6.3% to 11.1%.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 88.2%

 

Day 4 – Cottonwood, AZ

On a random, mostly residential, street corner near downtown I found this statue. It looks like they are welcoming the rising sun or maybe worshipping the stop sign.

I went for an early morning bike ride at 6 AM to beat the heat. I actually rode up a mile north of Old Town Cottonwood to the community I’m interested in and did some exploring. Everyone who was out and about waved or smiled or said, “Mornin’,” as I passed by. I came across a trio of ladies walking their morning loop, and I slowed way down and asked how they liked living there, and they were all very happy.

But, so far, getting a realtor is an issue. I emailed a realtor that was selling the one of the ones that I was interested in. She emailed back to say she wasn’t available to show anything until next week, which I took to mean I can’t be bothered to drive over the mountains to get here. She is based in Chino Valley, which is over an hour away. She did give me the phone number of a local agent, so I called her and left a message. If I don’t hear from her before noon tomorrow, I’ll try the agent that Zillow has paired with me. But she is located in Prescott, which is over the same mountain pass and about the same hour away.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 92.5%

 

One Month In

We arrived in Klamath Falls a month ago today.

We are still stuck in that awkward time between agreeing on a price and actually taking possession of the house and the big hold up is the bank’s appraisal, there is a 4 week backlog. At this rate we will have to get lucky to get into the house by Christmas. We have agreed to extend our stay in the AirBnB until 12/21. The Host wrote back saying she was going to block off the place until the 5th of January, just in case we need longer.

Both the rental car and the Mini were returned to their respective homes this afternoon. On further troubleshooting it was determined that both the #2 and #4 cylinders were reading bad. Because we had the coil pack on #1 replaced in May and now #2 & #4 were acting up, we agreed to go ahead and change the coil pack on #3 because sure enough in a couple weeks that probably would have started acting up as well. Add in the cast of the rental car for a week and are out over $600.

Over the weekend I developed some pain in the upper left of my mouth. It really didn’t feel too bad, until this morning when the pain increased to about a 3 of 10. I though maybe it was time to see a dentist. There were 10 listed that were in our dental insurance network. Several were a little too far away so I eliminated them. There were two practically next door to each other, not far from our favorite grocery store, so I called one of them hoping I could get to see the doctor this week. The receptionist said, “We just had a cancellation for 4:00 PM. Would that do?” I said, “See you then.” They took x-rays. After the dentist took a look them, she then poked and scraped and prodded around the two bad teeth. She said’ “I don’t see anything obvious, maybe it is just a sinus infection.” She prescribed an antibiotic and said if it doesn’t clear up in a week, call me. Then she added, “And call me if it does work.”

We have had a fairly mild November so far here, but things are about to get real with highs in the 40’s and lows in the upper teens to low 20s. And next week leading up to Thanksgiving there is a good chance of a bit of the white stuff.

Wednesday the 13th

We got up at 5:30 this morning to go to the YMCA (The best time for lap swimming is between 5 and 7 AM.) When Donna went to turn on the bathroom light, it didn’t come on. She used the hallway light as a guide to do her stuff. When I went in I thought it might be a burnt out bulb, but when I tried to turn on something we had plugged into the outlets where the switch was, it wouldn’t come on either. We headed off to the the Y and I’d further troubleshoot when we got back.

The poor Mini has to sit outside uncovered and that means before we can go anywhere, the windows have to be cleared of dew or frost each morning. This morning it was frost on one side and dew on the other, with the windshield it was dew that turned to frost when swiped… We got underway fine, buy a half mile or so down the road the Mini started to hesitate when I shifted. While waiting on the next stoplight to turn green the idle became sort of rough. Accelerating away and shifting into second it bogged down a bit and a giant yellow half-filled check engine light popped up in the middle of the tach. The car ran OK the rest of the way with an occasional hesitation on the 1-2 shift. On the way home it ran mostly better, but still not perfect and the light stayed off.

When we got back to the AirBnB we discovered that not only was the bathroom effected, but every kitchen outlet was not working. Including the one for the refrigerator! So we frantically texted the owner (we had his number because we had been in contact before to repair the dishwasher and fix the very annoying sticky front door.) We also messaged via the AirBnB app the host. After about 45 minutes we started getting calls, texts and messages about our issue. Eventually the owner showed up around 9 AM to start trying to solve our issue. He tried flipping breakers on and off. He tried shutting off the main breaker and turning it back on with little success. We left him physically swapping breakers around inside the box as we had that other bug-a-boo to deal with.

I had gotten a Mini service place recommendation from a fellow Y member just the other day and when I called them they said they could read the code, but wouldn’t be able to do anything today because they were slammed. So we headed over there to see what was going on. The Mini on the way over was doing well under a mile or so from our destination when it was running crummy and the half-filled light came back on. They ran the code and it came back as P0302, cylinder #2 misfire. They asked if I wanted to set up an appointment, went I said yes, they asked how about next Tuesday. Uh, OK.

It really wasn’t OK, we were planning on leaving Thursday morning to go up to Granite Falls, WA to visit the Morrison clan. Having already cancelled on them once because of the house buying stuff, we decided not to repeat it. Solution, rent a car, there is an Enterprise office in town, so we headed there after the car repair place. Bad news there too, they didn’t have any cars to rent. The good news was that they were expecting some returns by 5:00 PM, so they entered our info and said they’d give us a call.

Returning to our home away from home, we found our landlord/owner just finishing up. He finally figured out the issue, a previous tenant had decided to keep his stereo equipment in the hall closet and as a precaution he had replaced the normal outlet in there with a GFCI one and for some unknown reason it had tripped.

For the trifecta of bad news all we needed now was the the owner of our prospective house to turn down our counter offer to return some money at closing so we care afford a new roof for her old place. Sure enough around 4:00 PM our realtor emailed to say that it was a no-go. At this point we both thought maybe this was the universe telling us it was time to tuck our tails between our legs and move back to Aiken.

Well, our realtor and the sellers realtor (not wanting to lose a commission) had talked and suggested an alternate offer might work. Ask for a reduction of the house sale price to match the amount we wanted at closing.

So by the end of the day our AirBnB was back to it’s normal mediocre self, we had a rental car to do the traveling to Washington and we had made a counter-counter offer on the house.

If a Wednesday the 13th was this troublesome, I hate to think what will happen a month from now on Friday, December 13th.

House Hunters IX

Even though we have placed an offer and it was accepted on House #5, after the home inspection last Thursday we are now having second thoughts. The front half of the roof needs replacing. The back half was done recently, but not correctly, they didn’t flash or put a boot over the electrical drop and other boots over the other 3 vents are torn. So new roof is in the near future. Because it is a hill side lot gutters should also be installed. The grade in the back needs to be re slopped away from the house to keep the water run off out from around the foundation. Both sides of the driveway retaining walls are leaning pretty good, not too urgent, but another couple grand to straighten out. The small rear deck on the back is kind of squishy in spots and there is a repair job on the back outside wall near ground level that needs attention. So this morning we combed the Sunday paper for Open Houses and plugged addresses into the GPS.

House #23 – This one is over in the area of town we would like to live in. It has recently been remodeled, along with the inside rooms, just about every major component has been freshened. The insides have character, but there is so much character that it bordered on quirky. There are 2 bedrooms up with a really nice bath between them and zero carpet. There were two bedrooms down as well. One bedroom down there with a random sink in it and its closet was around the corner. A shared bath, then a second bedroom that had a small extra room that could serve as a walk-in closet. All of the downstairs was freshly carpeted. The garage was intriguing in that it was a tandem, two cars could fit, but they had to be in a line.

House #24 – This too is right where we would really like to live. It is only 1,00 feet away from House #23 as the crow flies. It is 2 blocks up and two over, or 1/4 mile, for us land bound humans. This place is 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, which is nicer than House #23 in that on the main floor there was an actual master suite, then a second separate bath and a second separate bedroom. Downstairs was 2 beds and a bath with a separate laundry room. This was not as updated as #23, but as compensation there was an over-sized two car garage/shop a couple of steps up from the carport and back entrance to the house.

Both these places were similar to good old House #5 in that the upstairs areas were traditional sort of layouts and the downstairs levels were a warren of rambling rooms and hallways. And both were really more than we want to spend on a house. So we headed further west of town to go to two more open houses.

House #25 – This one was like Brian wanted in that it was all on one level. The kitchen needed updating, but it would be serviceable for a while. It did have a master suite, but the stand up shower was even smaller than the one we left behind in Aiken. There was carpet everywhere which we would have to pull up and replace with wood. No central air conditioning. It is not really too far out of town or too far from the YMCA, but to get to either place you had to drive through the area where all the shopping is, so it is not fun. The only real redeemable thing about the place was the back yard, it was a nice size with a small covered deck. There were a couple of small out buildings, including a greenhouse with four dug up holes in it1.

House #26 – This Open House visit was one more bone for Brian’s desire for one level living. The photos looked promising. It had all the right ingredients, 3 bedrooms with two baths. A master bedroom with wood floors. Two car garage with a nice size backyard that had a small deck. But then things unraveled quickly. It was a mile or so further out from the already far out #25. The homes were so cookie-cutter that on a dark night you would be hard pressed not to pull into the wrong driveway. In the end this Open House suffered the same fate as Home #11, we didn’t even bother to go inside it.