City of the future

There's a lot of building going on here in Denver. I've seen or heard from 3 different famous architects in the last couple of weeks - Steven Holl, who's design architect for the Denver Justice Center Courthouse (which I will probably be working on in some capacity because my firm is the local architect) has been wandering around in our office, Robert AM Stern is design architect for the "Cosmopolitan Club" (downtown assisted living facility) which I've been working on off and on, and tonight I went and saw Daniel Libeskind (designer of the Denver Art Museum expansion and the World Trade Center master plan) unveil his design of the civic center park in the middle of downtown (picture below, article here)




Its really rare to see so many high profile projects going on simultaneously, with both public and private money. Even cooler is that I get to be somehow involved in some of it. The fact that these big shot out-of-state types are swarming all over tells me the word is getting out about Denver. The civic center park looks to be a very cool place to go when you all come out here (although since its just in the "vision" stage, it will be years before its complete). Libeskind echoed some of the same sentiment that attracted me here, about the pride that Denverites have in their city, and the bright future the area has. I keep thinking its such a awesome time to get to be a small part of building this city at this point in its history.

Its funny that when we decided to move out here, I was just hoping I could find a reasonable job working on halfway decent projects. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I'd love to actually move here. Just gotta sell the house!

Our Weekend

Just a recap of our weekend, for no particular reason....

We signed a bunch of paperwork on Saturday morning to officially put our hold on the house, with first right of refusal. We've probably got about 6 weeks to get the OC house sold before the Parker house closes. We've got an extremely reasonable price going, having dropped almost $100K from the original asking price, so we're hoping it goes soon. We're getting more and more attached to the Parker house, so we'd definitely prefer that this would work out than not, but if not I'm sure there's a reason for it.

We showed it to the Heldts, and they gave it a thumbs up, so we figure that counts for something.

We took Ella for a walk along Cherry Creek Trail (different than the Cherry Creek Reservoir, where Jenna went a while back). The trail follows the creek for miles, and seems like a great place to ride your bike. We'll have to get a couple of bikes once the finances are in order. We didn't see a lot of wildlife (we were hoping to spot some deer or antelope or something), but we were nearly eaten by this ferocious snake
Okay, so that photo is enlarged. It was actually about a foot long, and completely harmless. Here's another picture with Ella in it for scale. She was completely oblivious (not the most observant dog)


(yes, if you were wondering, that is Ella's poo in the bag... you've got to take it with you - they're really big on that in the C.O., which is good, because I don't like to step in poo any more than the next guy)

We visited the Heldts and checked out their halfway installed landscape (coming along quite nicely, but I'm sure they'll post about that), and found a convenient back road between their place and our prospective house in Parker that takes around 20 minutes. I also checked out Jenna's new stable. We think its in this stretch of forest called the "black forest", because it pretty abruptly changes from wide open prairies to dense evergreen forest. Its pretty cool, and not too far from our prospective house (although it feels like your in the wilderness).

I think that's about all...

First week at the new barn

Well, here I am in the middle of my first week at the new job - Platinum Farms. I have today off, so I worked Mon, Tues and Wed, and I'll work tomorrow. So far it's totally my ideal job - 4 days a week, about 6-7 hrs a day, and all with horses! Who could ask for more?! The most exciting part so far was yesterday, one of the horses ripped a gash in his face and had to get stitches. No one saw him do it, so we're not sure exactly what happened, but horses do have a tendency to hurt themselves on invisible things...I wish I had my camera to take a pic so I'd have a good picture to go with my story. Tomorrow I'll take it along and get a picture of the stitches. It would have been cool to have before and after pics, though.

Tomorrow I also get my first lesson with the trainer, Rochelle. I've seen her give other people lessons and I like her style, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Other than that I'm just trying to remember everyone's names - the people and the horses! It's double the work of starting a regular job where you just have to remember people's names. It's pretty funny though because I can remember a horse's name after hearing it just once, yet it takes several times before I remember the peoples' names! If I was still in school, I'd like to do some sort of research on that fact. I wonder what makes the difference...

$5 buys you a lot in Colorado

Friday afternoon we went back to a new neighborhood we had previously visited with our realtor, to go check on a spec house we liked (spec houses are new houses that the builder goes ahead and starts building, with the options preselected in the assumption that someone will buy them). We found out it had sold, but decided to check out what else the builder had. We found a house that we both dug, with pretty much everything we were looking for. The lot is awesome, with a huge park in front and a small patch of designated open space behind, which rolls off downhill into a great view across Parker to the mountains and the city. Plus its got most of what we were looking for as far as floorplan and bedrooms. The yard is huge, which we actually are a little worried about due to the high price of water in Denver, but it would be great for Ella. We asked about putting a hold on it, and they told us it usually requires around $1500 - $2000 earnest money deposit, but they were having a special right now for 5.

"$500?" We both said... thinking "that's a good deal!"...

"No, 5 dollars" she replied.

So we put a hold on the house. Its scheduled to be completed 30-60 days (by the looks of it, its more like 60 days +), which buys us that amount of time to sell our house. If it doesn't work out, we're down 5 bucks.

We're trying not to get too attached to the house, but now that we've invested such a large sum of money in it, we feel like its ours. There's plenty of little things we'd like to change if we could (me being in the business I'm in), but as a whole its definitely our favorite that we've seen (except for the houses that were too expensive for us), and we've seen a lot of houses. Incredible deal compared to orange county. Here's a pic

and a pic of the view from the backyard (zoomed, but that's the back fence).

and the park across the street (the house is right where the boxy green scion is parked in the upper right portion)



Now have some kind of investment (even if its only $5) in a home in Parker, we were thrilled to happen upon a new church in Parker, that we went to this morning. We got a really good vibe about it, even though its still pretty small and growing. We've been to something like 8 different churches since we've been here, (we haven't been as daring as the Santagatas) and we are feeling like this is probably going to be our home church. They are definitely in need of some help, being a growing church, so hopefully we'll figure out where we can best be of use and plug in there.


So the last, and biggest, piece of the puzzle left is the sale of our house back in the OC. All prayers are greatly appreciated on that one, as the market seems really slow, while its starting to pick up again here in Colorado (which is why the $5 hold is a great deal). We will be very, very, very, very excited when that day comes.

So we're seriously hoping this is it, and it will be smooth sailing from here. We can't wait to have a kitchen and a refrigerator, we owe Mike and Rachel some meals... as well as anyone else that wants to come visit. If all works out the Hoskinson bed & breakfast will be open for business by ski season.

Zoo Day

Today I went to the Denver zoo with Rachel, Aubrey, and her parents who were in town visiting. I have put together a small slideshow with some of the better pics. I think the white wolf pic is my favorite. You can also visit my photobucket page for all the pics, if you're interested:

click here

That should take you to the album where you can click on the pics individually or click on "slideshow".

Nature and stuff

Since this is my last week off before starting work, I decided to take advantage of the free day. I took Ella to Cherry Creek State Park and walked around some trails, and saw this lovely pond with ducks swimming in it. I thought our camera had a pretty good zoom, but apparently it's not quite as good as I thought as the duck still looks pretty tiny in my pic! (See him there, he's that spec in the middle of the picture. You can actually see his wake pretty well.)

Also, last night, when I took Ella downstairs and outside to use the grass, I spotted this HUGE praying mantis hangin' out on the stair rail...way cool!

I got a job!

On Saturday I met with the trainer from Platinum Farms, and she offered me a paying job! Since about a week and a half ago when the dressage barn wanted me to work for free I have been a little discouraged, but Jay reminded me that I still had the meeting with Rochelle from Platinum Farms coming up. So, Saturday I met with her and everything is working out beautifully. I start next Monday, which is another week of being home alone, but at least I have a paying job and it's a job I will love, again. I can't believe how blessed Jay and I are in all of this.

In other news, we are in the process of trying to get out of our contract with the realtor back in CA. We still have another month left on it, and we know the house is just going to sit there. Our realtor has to "check with her boss" about letting us off, so hopefully they will so we can get going with a bigger company, which will hopefully be more aggressive and have more resources.

Living Small

I've been working on this huge senior/assisted living "club" in downtown. There's a mix of units, from 3 bedroom "independent living" to these studios for alzheimer's patients. We're trying to fit all the different needs into the available space in the building (urban projects are actually pretty fun because its really challenging), and still provide enough manuevering room in the public areas for an abnormal amount of wheelchairs and disabled seniors to make their way around. Anyway, I was thinking these "memory care" units seemed really small at around 300 sf. I decided to measure our apartment for a comparison, and how much room do we have here?

292 sf.

I'm not complaining, its just kind of funny. Our kitchen still cracks me up. Its like a badge of honor to say how small of a living space you've managed to adapt to. As long as its temporary of course...