Home
We had kicked around the idea of moving away from the Austin heat and Texas politics for a few years, but among other things we had never found the right place. At the end of August 2024 I retired, with Kelly having retired the year before. An unlikely sequence of events brought New Mexico to our attention, and after a little research Kelly suggested we take a look at Santa Fe. In December 2024 we took our first trip to Santa Fe, and before that trip was over I had decided I wanted to move here. It took Kelly a bit longer to make the decision, but in early 2025 we were back in Santa Fe looking for a place to live. We moved here in April, bought a house in August, and moved into it in December 2025. As documented elsewhere on the website, the three month delay in moving in was caused by wanting to do some renovations, trying to get estimates, learning that people are serious when they talk about the slow pace of work in Santa Fe, and ultimately deciding that the house was already pretty damn nice and we could work with it as it stands.
Side note on photography: This is more a plain blog entry than a photography entry. I may cheat and come back to replace some of the photos with better ones later. I had some ideas whose execution I don’t love, so at the moment it’s much more about the story than the photos.
The road home
This is the road in front of our house. It looks like we must be miles out of town in some remote area. Instead, we’re in the city limits and a couple miles from downtown. A lot of Santa Fe roads look like this, as it turns out, and I don’t know if it’s just priorities in the face of a lack of city funds or if it’s all about aesthetics. And I don’t care. In the background you get a hint of why I don’t care.
Trying to be inobtrusive
This is the back corner of our home. This style and color scheme is the rule in Santa Fe: the houses deliberately blend into the landscape. The splash of turquoise is also common.
Views and space
So why by a house on a gravel road, with scrubby trees for landscaping? Views and some space to play in, more or less.
From the back deck.
The view from inside isn’t bad, either.
Arroyo
This arroyo runs through the back of our property. Usually it looks like this, but on rare occasion it’s full of fast-moving water. So we’re told. For now it’s a footpath for people, dogs, and deer, mostly.
We have a greenhouse?!
Our house came with a greenhouse! We’re learning about it slowly. We added a little solar panel on the roof to power the fans (I guess the previous owners ran an extension cord). It’s unseasonably warm here right now, and we regularly see temperatures over 100 degrees in the greenhouse. It’s supposed to cool down tomorrow, but later this year we’ll be trying out the greenhouse shade the previous owners left for us.
The woodpile is not so useful as we had planned. We were going to turn the gas fireplace into a wood fireplace, but that renovation got ditched along with almost all the rest. We do have a chiminea, though, and now we have enough wood for perhaps a decade.
Settling in
Kelly made this lovely gal to watch over the side garden area. She made this off-site, but now has a pottery studio with kiln here at home. All of that is starting to make it feel like we’re really at home here. It’s a nice feeling.