Surmise to say, I might have snagged the last good real estate deal in Carbondale in 1987. It was a 7,200 square-foot residential building site in the old part of town — at 756 Sopris Avenue, to be precise — for $16,000 cash. By 1988, a developer offered me $20,000 for it.
The south-facing lot had unobstructed views of Mount Sopris. The first fall in my new house, back in 1990, I shot a picture of a cattle drive on Highway 133 from my living room. This was before the Donita Townhomes were built to the south, effectively ending my Sopris views from the ground floor. I still had one of my second-floor windows through which to view the mountain. From the east side second-story windows, I looked down on a neighbor’s small log cabin, which was torn down to make way for a big house a few years back.
The history of my purchase began in an unlikely place: upstairs of the Dinkel building at the KDNK studio. As I remember it, Frank Smotherman was doing a radio show. I walked up the building’s creaky steps and in on Smotherman. I said “Frank, I’ve got $16,000 in the bank and am looking for a building site in Carbondale.” He replied, “I didn’t know you were in that kind of financial position.” This assumption might have arisen from the fact I drove a mustard-color 1973 Toyota Corolla and sometimes dressed like a bum. Frank and I later met and he told me the only residential building site in my price range was at 756 Sopris Avenue.
The out-of-town owners had put up a self-made “For Sale by Owner” sign and were asking $12,000 for the lot. Eventually, they hired Smotherman, who raised the price to $16,000. Four years earlier, the 1983 oil-shale bust in West Garfield County immediately put about 2,000 Exxon employees out of work, and real estate prices from New Castle to Parachute plunged. I was working at the old Free Weekly newspaper in Glenwood Springs at the time and saw an ad for a new condo in Rifle for, as I recall, $16,000. I thought about buying that, but decided I wanted to live in Carbondale if possible.
That’s the story about the lot’s purchase, but here is how I got to that point. Both of my parents were thrifty and managed to give their three boys some money. My older brother used his sum to remodel his house and my younger brother used his to buy a condo. I put my money in the bank and forgot about it until hooking up with Smotherman.
I started working at the old Valley Journal newspaper in 1987, not long after I bought the building site. I worked three other part-time jobs from time to time as well: delivering the Aspen Times downvalley route once a week, fulfilling the duties of a “popcornist,” also once a week, at the Crystal Theatre and editing the Valley Journal’s quarterly tourist guide, “The Lark.” I think I had the delivery job for about four years.
A friend said I would be able to build a house because I didn’t eat out and didn’t take vacations. She wasn’t too far off.
At the initial closing for the building site, the sellers said they had a three-bedroom, single-story floor plan I could buy, but it sounded boilerplate and I declined.
In the fall of 1989, with money I’d saved — plus some from cashing in on my IRA — I was able to go to Joe Schofield at Alpine Bank for a construction loan. Owning my lot outright helped in getting the loan. All totaled, I think I paid a little less than $60,000 for labor, materials and fixtures. The house’s first appraised value was $80,000.
My house had a shed roof, redwood siding, two bedrooms, one and half baths and was roughly 800-square-feet downstairs and 400-square-feet upstairs with an open floor plan. The house was the first built on that block since the ‘70s when someone built one at the corner of 7th and Sopris.
For the most part construction was fairly uneventful, except for the time when my contractor’s only worker vanished one day. He said the guy turned out to be a narc or drug informant of some kind.
I had told my architect I wanted to add to Carbondale’s architecture. That’s how it turned out in my view, although not exactly as I imagined. I sold the house in 2009, and the new owners expanded it in such a way it looks nothing like my original house. And that’s okay.
