Retirement

Sally, my neighbor to the north, remarked as she was dripping sweat in the alley that she thinks it’s time for her to find a smaller place to live, one with little or no yard work. Yesterday we chatted some more about real estate, the virtues and nonvirtues of our neighborhood, and what we want to live in as we dodder into old age.

I’ve already looked at a few of the condos my Realtor has shown me lately and thought she might like one or two of them, so I forwarded the MLS descriptions he’d sent. She says she wants to move to Scottsdale, not downtown. He’d sent a couple of listings for Scottsdale places, but I could only find one of them, a two-story patio home. Dunno about Sally, but I figure two stories is out of the question for the place where you expect to holler your last hurrah. I don’t want to climb up and down steps every ten minutes now, much less in another ten years when I’m getting really decrepit.

Sally’s determination to move bodes poorly for the Funny Farm. She is the best person to have as a neighbor: quiet and responsible about upkeep. She does not litter the driveway and the street with her rolling stock. She does not allow the paint to peel or the roofing shingles to curl. She’s not a raving mental case. Best of all, she has no barking dogs and no screaming children.

Whenever a neighbor moves, it makes one nervous. It’s such a crap shoot, what moves into the vacant property. Around the corner—mercifully out of earshot from my yard—some moron keeps a big, barking dog locked out in the backyard at all times. The animal is never taken indoors, and that (sensibly) is where it wants to be. It barks and cries nonstop: literally. It never, ever stops barking and begging to be let in out of the heat or cold. Apparently the neighbors complained, so the idiot owner had its vocal cords cut, to little avail. Now it makes a nonstop hoarse, groaning bark, a sound that’s even more disturbing (given the cruelty of the human’s behavior) than the only slightly louder normal barking.

Since the morons seem to outnumber you and me and Sally, I naturally worry about what kind of chuckleheads will move into her house.

Sally’s restlessness exacerbates mine. She’s almost ten years older than I am, and right at the point where yes, she probably does need to get into a smaller, easier-to-maintain place. Me, I could last another decade here. But I’d kind of like to get set in a place where I could reasonably live out the last years of my life before I reach the point where I absolutely, positively have to move.

The place on Portland is really very nice in many ways. It’s almost perfect except for its cramped size. If it had a den in addition to the two tiny bedrooms, or if it had just a little more living/dining space, I would jump at it, even though it is on top of a freeway. But I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in three tiny rooms.

The two big problems with my house (besides the encroaching blight) are that it has four bedrooms and I only need two, and that it has a pool, which I don’t think I’m going to be able to care for many more years. A pool requires daily work and is a hole in the ground into which you pour money.

Otherwise, there are many, many things I love about it and that I really don’t want to forsake. For what I can afford, it’s very hard to beat this house. Therein lies the problem: I run around the city and look at perfectly acceptable places but find them wanting compared to what I have. When I do find something that has everything I want and nothing I don’t want, the cost is way more than I could get for my house.

Every time I go through this exercise, I find myself listing pro’s and cons: what’s good about this place, what’s good about that, and so on ad nauseam. This morning it occurred to me that since that strategy gets me nowhere, it might be more useful to consider what my lifestyle is like—or at least, what I value in my lifestyle—and then think about what a house needs to have to accommodate those qualities.

Here’s what happens when I try to codify that thought:

And what does that describe?

Yup. The house that I’m in. Or…it comes very close to it.

Given that you can’t have everything—it may be, for example, that I never will be able to afford a place that fits that description in a better part of town, and in a city like Phoenix, it’s impossible to find quiet—maybe what I need to do is rebuild this place so that it can and will shelter me in old age without killing me.

Looking again at the pro’s and cons of the house and neighborhood I’m living in:

One of the neighbors remarked that if this neighborhood were going to succumb to the creeping blight, it would have done so by now. I don’t know about that…nothing lasts forever. However, let’s assume it stays moderately safe, especially if the resident is armed with a nice little Ruger, for another ten to fifteen years. In that case, there are some things I could do to make the place work for an aging Boomer:

The totally unused room is adjacent to two bathrooms: plumbing and drains are right on the other side of the east wall. I could pull out the shower stall in the joke of a minibathroom that serves the tiny master bedroom and install a door, joining the two bedrooms through a pass-through half-bath. Then, put in a fine sybaritic bathtub (actually, I’m thinking one of those fake claw-foot things made of the plastic stuff that’s ludicrously easy to clean), lots of lights, and a set of cabinets to serve as a dressing table. Hang capacious and handsome mirrors over and around this dressing area. Replace the louvered folding closet doors with mirrored sliding doors. Replace the aged, tacky aluminum-framed window with French doors opening onto the back patio.

This would at least make that room useful. The existing bathtub in the hall bathroom could then be replaced with a shower stall that’s accessible by wheelchair; the doorway into that bathroom could be widened to make it possible for a wheelchair or walker to get in there.

Alternatively, I could move the storage in the front secondary bedroom into the unused back bedroom; move my office from the adjacent front secondary bedroom into the so-called master bedroom, tear out the wall between the two front bedrooms, reroute one of the AC vents, rebuild the entrance to the (now new) room, tear out the ridiculous closets and install a large walk-in closet, and end up with a very nice, huge master bedroom. This, too, would eliminate completely unused space and improve living space.

Replastering the pool, which will have to happen in about five to eight years, will cost $8,000 to $10,000 in today’s dollars. For about the same amount, I could fill in the pool. So…why not take, say, $20,000 to fill in the pool, jackhammer up the hideous KoolDeck, and relandscape the backyard, extending the shade cover the length of the back and planting a big, gorgeous emerald paloverde out there? This would eliminate the entire pool care issue and extend the low-maintenance garden, making the back sitting area much more pleasant and cutting power and water bills significantly.

Welp. I have to get up and go to work, so this little reverie needs to end. But…it’s something to think about: would it not be better to make this house work than to try to move to a different house, with all the hassle and expense that entails?

Not an exaggeration. By midafternoon the temp on the covered porch in back was 118 degrees. Fahrenheit, that is.

It’s 9:00 p.m. now and the heat persists: 105 in the dark. This afternoon I needed to make a quick Costco run, pump some gas, buy a couple of necessities. Walking across the parking lot made one’s skin feel burnt, exposed to something way, way too hot. God only knows what the temperature was over the asphalt surface. I sure don’t want to know.

A tiny storm blew across the Valley late in the afternoon, not enough to drop any rain to speak of but plenty to drop a bushel of devil-pod leaves and seed pods into the pool. Whee!

In Yarnell, the seedy little above-the-Mogollon-Rim wide spot in the road I dream of—my Gloccamorra, my Bali Hai—the heat topped out at 98. The night will drop to 75 degrees, and as we scribble it’s 85 up there. Tomorrow night will be around 70 degrees, and the high on Monday will be 88.

Yesterday KJG and I drove up to Yarnell, where we spent a fair amount of the day hanging out with La Maya and La Bethulia, who are happily reclaiming their weekend home from La Maya’s sister and BiL, who, after renting it for four years, have succeeded in finding their own home, down in the Chino Valley. La Maya is especially thrilled to have her escape from GDU back. La Bethulia, who spent rather more time than she wished on the roof fiddling with the swamp cooler, has other ideas…sale, for example.

But oh! it was so cool, so quiet, and so lovely up there! We visited our favorite purveyor of tourist gewgaws, the Yarnell Emporium, where a short in the electrical system had knocked out the air-conditioning. Our favorite saleslady was disgusted: melting in the heat, said she. Inside the shop, we thought it was pleasantly cool. One person’s 85 degrees is another person’s Carlsbad Caverns cool.

Don’t believe me? Along about 7:00 p.m. this evening, the AC in my house was set to 80 degrees. And so it was in the hall, in the middle of the house as far as possible from an exterior wall, where the thermostat dwells. The bedrooms? 82 degrees. The kitchen, where nothing for dinner was cooked indoors? 88 degrees.

Back in Yarnell (that would be yesterday), La Maya remarked that the house their friends Bill and Joe rebuilt and turned into a sweet little palace is for sale. Wouldn’t we like to see it?

Well, why not? What else did we have to do? So we dropped by Hill Top Realty and asked a bored Realtor if she wouldn’t like to take us over there. Hot dang…anything to get out of the office! How many times can a person manicure her nails in front of the computer?

So with a little ado, she extracted the alarm system code and a few other key bits of information from the listing agent, and off we went to view the place.

O. M. G. Is it sweet!

Big kitchen with tons of cabinet space and counter space. Dishwasher, a rarity in Arizona’s rural towns. Breakfast nook. Huge separate dining room.

Master bedroom: larger than my family room and dining room combined. Current owners have a king-sized bed and all the bedroom accoutrements in there, and a set of overstuffed chairs and accompanying tables and lamps in there.

Two other bedrooms, one as large as my master bedroom.

Vast living room with a beautiful fireplace.

A separate office, off the dining room looking out onto the boulder-strewn backyard.

Backyard: good freaking grief. It backs onto a great pile of granite boulders. When it rains, a waterfall pours off the boulders into a well designed, rock-lined drainage stream that directs the water down through a side yard and away from the house.

The backyard is very private. It cannot be seen from the neighbors’ yards. There is a trail through the rocks above, part of the world-famous Yarnell Shrine. The occasional tourist would stroll by…and by occasional, we mean “rare.”

In the side yard: A raised garden with soaker hoses and wire shelter to fend of the javelina and hungry birds.

Front yard (huge!): a spectacular art fountain procured from a Prescott artist. Trees. Ornamentals. Blue spruce. Xeric landscaping. Peaceful, pretty, quiet. One house from the end of a cul-de-sac.

Two-and-a-half-car detached garage: room for a ton of storage, the Dog Chariot, and a nice golf cart for junketing around town.

No pool. No effing helicopters. No traffic roar. No sirens. No heat.

Gosh.

They want $199,000 for it, about what I probably could get for my house if I’m lucky. However, Realtor Lady remarked that these days Yarnellites will accept just about any bid they get. She suggested just coming up with a figure and offering it: nothing ventured, nothing gained. If I could get it for $150,000 and it really doesn’t need any upgrades or fix-up (on the surface, it appears to be a turnkey sort of thing), I could afford it.

On the other hand…

My son is down here.

All my friends are down here.

Choir is down here.

My pseudo-job is down here.

The pseudo-job, I could deal with: rent an apartment or camp out with SDXB and other friends for the days I have to physically coalesce in front of a classroom. A pain in the ass, but doable.

Hm. Because the house has a separate, dedicated office, both of the secondary bedrooms could function as guest bedrooms: enough space for two couples to come up out of the heat. Allll summer long. The friends problem could be addressed.

Yarnell.

♥