Kristina Watkins, Summit Sotheby's International Realty
This is YOUR adventure.
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Every Halloween, the same.
The costumed crowd begins to form.
Pulsing, pushing, the swarm overtakes the street.
The animals, adorned and incentivized.
The humans, well-accessorized.
As dusk settles, a weariness takes hold.
Uphill they trudge with their prizes.
Towards home.
Presuming you’re not so dim as to choose a racist costume or to go running around terrorizing people with a chainsaw (“This is Miami, he has a gun”) there is nothing not to love about Halloween. The weather is usually beautiful, the last of the leaves are about to fall, and everything is properly autumn. Soups because we’ve waited all winter. I made beef stew Saturday and pot roast yesterday and there’s not a meat in my fridge I won’t hesitate to braise because it’s finally cold overnight. We’re wearing sweaters again! Of course we have to take them off by noon but no one cares because there is a Tim Burton movie to watch when we get home.
I don’t think there’s a town in Utah that celebrates Halloween quite like Park City. Oh I know there are the pay-$20-get-lunged-at haunted houses throughout the valley, and the theme park Lagoon stays open late and has ghouls running around, and if I weren’t so old and tired I might venture over to some dance club or local theatre with my bag of toast, spray bottle, and lighter for a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Just kidding, you can’t bring your own anymore. In my day you brought your own toast.)
Here in Park City, Main Street shuts down for the afternoon so that entire costumed families can show off their holiday spirit. We call it “Howl-o-ween” because there is a “dog parade” but really it’s just bedlam, but just the sort of bedlam you know Park City can guarantee.
NEW FRIENDS NEW FRIENDS NEW FRIENDS NEW FRIE
Seeing more than one legit Chewbacca costume isn’t unusual. Despite prohibitive laws, there are open containers a-plenty.
^^^HOW IT’S DONE^^^
All the bars and restaurants are participating in some way. Someone is usually playing spooky music and once they tried to stage a Thriller flash mob but everyone had been drinking and nobody knew the steps anyways. Typical.
It’s also the last big holiday before we get buried in snow, so many people decorate their houses for the event. Assuming we didn’t get a freak storm of course, which is always possible. My favorite street for this is Daly Ave. You’re in Old Town, so the houses are old and spooky anyways, plus they’re close together and you get a lot of bang for your walking buck. And the kids luck out as well; they can trick-or-treat on Main at all the shops plus they can trick-or-treat the houses once it gets dark.
This is the time of year when chilly stuff is fun and optional, and the only big stress is when to turn the sprinklers off for the season and if you bought enough fun-size candy to not give out. No family ordeals, no pressure for big meals or parties or events.
Just black clothes, candy, and Christopher Lee reading “The Raven”. My kind of holiday.
*Featured photo taken by our rockstar photographers at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty. Then entire tour for that year’s parade can be seen here.
If you’ve ever watched Barnwood Builders you get the drift; somebody acquires an ancient barn or log home, they deconstruct it, then re-construct it either into the same shape structure or a modified structure. But the point is to save a building that has been let go far too long. It’s actually a beautiful way to repurpose what might be a condemned structure. And that is the story of 1403 Eagle Way, listed by a colleague of mine at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty. You can view the virtual tour here, and as you’ll see in the drone shots at the beginning, the views are fantastic, and here is the full listing report.
The story continues: apparently the dramatic timbers repurposed here are from an Essex grain barn, built in the 17th Century.
And they are MAGNIFICENT.
Now, you know how important good ceilings are to me. And this? Good ceiling. Very good ceiling.
The timber and brick usage above the stove! Oh, my heart.
This is the upstairs loft area, and it is a perfectly lovely place to write or knit or plan your next Game of Thrones-style betrayal.
And everywhere in the home they have preserved the gorgeous joinery. In their time, these joints were built for function, and made to last for 400 years or more. What we might dismiss as only an aesthetic choice today was simply a beautiful and elegant solution to a problem back then.
This is a special house.
One that needs to be preserved, loved. Respected. This home needs a special owner. One that will appreciate the big details, like the massive timbers.
And the little details, like the cast iron door pulls.
And lovely latches.
Portions of the house aren’t timber-accented, including the downstairs level. However there is an interesting wood feature here: the floor of the bar. Look closely.
Look MORE closely.
It’s an end grain wood block floor! I can’t think of another house in Park City with this type of flooring. Also known here in the US as Nicolson pavement, its origins are unknown, but surely trace back hundreds and hundreds of years. Wood was easier to work with and easier to obtain than rock for a very long time, so it was quite popular as street pavement until less slippery, less creosote-soaked, more durable stone-based paving became more available. It was also used on interiors, even into the 1970s Chrysler used it on some of their factory floors because it was easy on the feet and the equipment, easy to repair, and because it was indoors, didn’t rot or need to be sealed as often. Plus it’s beautiful.
This house is not gimmicky. But it is a home with impact. The location is good, the views are excellent, and the interior is lovely, memorable, and worth preserving.
I can’t remember the first time I heard about kolaches, but I do remember first making them myself maybe 5 or 6 years ago off an archived newspaper recipe. A kolache is a beautiful little baked pastry with choose-your-own filling. They’re labor-intensive and taste best hot out of the oven, which puts them in the same category as donuts and cinnamon buns: learn to make them, appreciate them, and then pay a professional baker to make them for you.
When I was first making kolaches no one in town sold them. No one. And it blew my mind; who wouldn’t want a sweet dough full of cream cheese filling? Or a savory dough stuffed with cheddar and bacon and egg?
The old-timey fillings are always the best. Cottage cheese. Poppyseed. But literally any filling is delicious and this whole concept emerged first out of necessity. If you had cherry jam in the fridge you used that. If the apricots had been plentiful then you used those.
Lemon is always a popular filling, and it didn’t matter whether you used lemon curd or lemon pudding or lemon pie filling. Just a little homemade drizzle of powdered sugar, lemon juice and water icing on top.
And I’m pleased to say, kolache joints are FINALLY starting to crop up.
No, it’s not the same as what your Czech grandmother could whip up (but let’s be honest, nothing will ever be that good again). But they are lovely and plentiful and in some cases, offer drive-through convenience. It’s been far too long since I ate at Dottie’s, but if you live anywhere near Heber you ought to drive over and take a look at what they have to offer.
Be sure and order a cream cheese kolache for me.
I am a real estate agent which means I take 7,000 phone calls a day. Scrolling through my Recents is enough to give my thumb a cramp. I also drive, walk, type and text every minute I’m awake, I can’t spend my life with one hand holding my phone on my ear. My elbow would rot and fall off. I also CANNOT suffer having a earpiece sitting in my ear. It’s been a personal problem since they came out and I know people love them and if you have one and love it then terrific. Every time I’ve worn one the urge to punch myself in the face is overwhelming.
A colleague introduced me to the ways of the neck headset (neckset?) and forever I am chang-ed. (Christine’s is different, the earpieces pull out of the ends, it’s more rigid, and it’s a very pretty color.) It’s like casual Borg meets the Secret Service. I tuck the whole thing into my collar and the wires stick up a little but who cares? It’s comfortable and bluetooth and NOT ON MY FREAKING EAR. The LG TonePro Bluetooth headset.
The earpieces magnet into the ends of the headset. The speakers are somewhere in those pointy bits too. It’s been months and I still haven’t bothered to figure the buttons out. Forward is on, backwards is off I think, there’s a volume and a next/previous. Word of warning: if you push the answer/hang up button in some sequence you will either answer/hang up, summon Siri, or call the last person you talked to. Which is only a minor inconvenience in most cases, “Whoops, hi sorry, didn’t mean to call you back.”
However. If you ended your call in a less than savory manner, and then yanked the earpiece from your ear and started complaining about how that person smelled, rest assured, they can hear you with crystal clarity and you aren’t yet aware of the war you’ve just started.
I also use it when I’m working in the yard or going to the gym. The yard is because weedwackers are loud and angry. The gym is because the gym is one of the places I wouldn’t be sad to see fall into a giant sinkhole, so I use it there to listen to ebooks. And I only listen to fun, descriptive books that I know I will love. If I had to listen to a businessy book club book I may as well eat a bowl of glass shards. So the last one I downloaded was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, narrated by Stephen Fry (who narrated the movie).
I’m seeing them more and more often now, particularly on service technicians and construction workers, which makes perfect sense. Keep your phone on your person someplace safe while you’re working, but you can still answer calls or use Siri by just touching the headset which is safely around your neck. Plus they hold a charge for quite a while; I just plug mine in at night with all my other devices and it’s ready to go in the morning.
*This post features affiliate links; please see below for the Affiliate Links Disclaimer.
As a human I’m qualified to point out something ridiculous we do: get terribly worked up waiting for something to happen. Sure, using tools was a great achievement, and mourning the dead was another big day, but at some point we went straight off the rails and let ourselves invent fantasies about what might, what is, and what has happened. I just don’t see a cheetah pacing around muttering about how that stupid wildebeest must have gotten lost and probably isn’t even fat enough to eat anyways.
As a real estate agent, I’m on the receiving end of a thousand conspiracy theories. It’s a fascinating insight into a client’s mind. And the theories—creative as they are—are always always always wrong.
Always.
Always wrong.
I’ve been told by buyers that the seller is getting divorced (they aren’t). I’ve been told by sellers that the buyers lost their jobs (they haven’t). I’ve been told by buyers and sellers that the other side is going bankrupt (they’re not). I’ve been told by buyers that sellers have rigged a dishwasher to appear to work until five minutes after we close (just…no). These are total strangers working up complex scenarios with personality and plot and I’ll be darned if I haven’t just about had my fill of fiction.
We have this ridiculous thing called free will. Free will. We choose to live our lives the way we do and other people choose to live theirs and our paradigms are as unique and specific as a gd snowflake. Except snowflakes are usually a little more, well, balanced. Oh I know, we watch Sherlock Holmes and think we can anticipate fifteen steps ahead of our adversary but our adversaries completely imaginary. I promise, that obnoxious checkout clerk who always smashes your eggs? They have no idea what you look like and just smash everybody’s eggs.
Our lives are just not that interesting. And neither are the lives of anybody else we’re interacting with. So let it go. The other side of any situation will do or say whatever they please, guided only by their own life experience and hopefully a shred of moral fiber. And they’re going to do all that whether we figure it out ahead of time or not. And considering the infinite and chaotic number of possibilities, you’re astoundingly lucky to dream up a theory in the same time zone as the actual situation, much less the same ballpark.
So let it go. Seriously.
Think of all the free time you’ll have now that you’re not imagining scenarios! You could knit sweaters for every nephew, dog, and penguin in the US. You could brew a thousand batches of beer then drink it all and brew a thousand more. You could map out the universe or walk every square mile of your hemisphere.
Or better yet, use that imagination and write the Great American Novel. I can’t wait to read it.
Watch this, you will love it. You’ll laugh and maybe cry a little. And then laugh again.
Also you should support your local PBS station.
I love me a good Arts and Crafts house. And shy of a full A&C restoration I will settle for a good handful of the correct elements and thoughtful furniture. Add that to a sprawling estate and my little heart goes pitter patter. Allow me to introduce 4275 Quarry Mountain Road*, listed by a colleague of mine at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty.
Here is the video. Here is the virtual tour. Here is the features list. Here is the MLS report and current pricing. Peruse at your leisure, I promise you won’t be disappointed. But let me walk you through what I love best about this house.
The entrance is grand and square and has a water feature running down each side of the walkway. The gutters draw water and ice down copper chains to a copper trough. Also red-trimmed windows, shake siding, and stained glass door and two sidelites. THE BALANCE SLAYS ME.
The main house and guest house sit on approx. 2.3 acres, which as you can see are flat and beautifully landscaped and surrounded by absurdly beautiful mountains. I should point out that there is no great drive to get here: this property is in town, one of only 36 parcels in the gated Quarry Mountain Ranch, which is off of Hwy 224/Park Ave/the main drag into and out of town. This house is 6 minutes from the Canyons Village at Park City Resort. SIX.
I like the lights over the island in the kitchen. I like the drawer and cabinet pulls. I like the tree motif in the tile above the window.
The house is an interesting mix of Arts & Crafts-inspired design and more opulent decor. This fireplace separates a bar area from a dining area, and this whole hall is in the neighborhood of 60 feet long.
This is the bar and sitting area on the other side of the fireplace, and LOOK AT THOSE CABINETS. I’m not certain if that is Sapele or Bubinga but the figure in that wood is is something most often reserved for fine furniture. I think that’s one of the main takeaways in this house: demand nothing less than excellent.
But it is still comfortable, and cozy. The A&C-inspired inlays on the chairs and bed matter. Though furniture is sometimes included and sometimes not included, it is important to the overall staging and character of your home. That is what people feel when they walk through and consider buying, so make good decisions. These are good decisions.
Stained glass? A+. Can you play “Floor or Ceiling?” in most of the rooms? Good.
Between the two buildings, I really like the way the roof isn’t always on posts into the deck area.
And where it is, the beams? They are glorious.
A+++.
*Home featured is 4275 Quarry Mountain Road, listed by a colleague of mine at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty. Photos taken by our superstar team of professional photographers at SSIR.
Okay, I know. It’s not a great name. Or it’s a brilliant name if you’re prone to making jokes in terrible taste. And I am. POCKET JUICE I MEAN REALLY. But 12-year old humor aside, this is the Tzumi Pocket Juice Charger, and this stupid little thing has saved my bacon so many times that I plug it in at night to charge just like my iPhone. And my headset. And camera battery. Anyways. It’s basically a portable battery pack that charges anything you can connect to with a USB cord.
There are a lot of versions of this little thing but mine is black and has a 4000 mAh output. I have no idea what that means. But I do know that I probably make north of a thousand calls, emails, texts, photos, social media, Kindle and Audible activities in any given day. So even though I start with it fully charged and it lives on a charger whenever I’m at a desk or in my car, I will inevitably run out of battery life just as I roll into Costco and really need to listen to music on my headset so I can drown out the screaming. (Mostly mine.) Or when I have a brilliant thing to say on video. Or have found a brilliant view that should be posted. Or if my out-of-town clients want to FaceTime through a property with me. “Low Battery” is my nemesis.
No more.
Yes I know it’s an iPhone 5, deal with it
This unfortunately-named device does the trick. I bought it before I had to do two 1-hour long FaceTime walk-throughs back-to-back. You can’t very well walk through a home while tethered to an outlet. So I literally opened this package, plugged it in, and 2 hours later was able to use it. It works like a supercharged wall charger; for my use that day I had it plugged into my phone so it was charging while I FaceTimed, charger in my pocket and my lightning cable hanging out connecting the two. It wasn’t the most graceful thing but it got the job done well, I was able to take care of my clients without any further delays or unprofessional technical difficulties.
It charges my devices faster than plugging it into the wall. (I have no scientific proof of this.) I use it on Open House Tour days, when we’re all bargaining for the one car charger which you can really only use for a few blocks until you get to the next open house and have to unplug it. But with this little devil, I can just carry it with me if times get lean. How about if I’m cooking dinner and need to be looking at a recipe or taking a call or running Pandora? I can throw the charger in my pocket and keep on keepin’ on. Truly, when I get the Low Battery notification anymore at home I just plug it into my charger, not my wall outlet. Also? I live in a 1955 house. Bless their hearts but in the 50s they couldn’t even fathom needing more than two outlets per room, so unless I want to lay on the ground underneath a precious outlet to finish a call, this solution is magical. Imagine airports! Conferences! The possibilities are endless.
Scratches! Not dog hair. This time.
There are a lot of versions Tzumi makes: mine is black and has the battery indicator in green on the front, and was $20. Four lights is fully-charged. Blinking is charging. Hold the power button for some amount of time and it turns a bright light on, which is helpful but curious, as iPhones have all but eliminated the need for pocket LED flashlights. But I’ll take it. The silver bits on the end do scratch very easily though. The photo above could just as easily be showing you dog hairs but for once, it isn’t. Mine came with a USB to mini-USB for charging, and I had to supply my own lightning cable to connect my iPhone and charger. But who cares? Bacon: saved.
*This post features affiliate links; please see below for the Affiliate Links Disclaimer.
About every six months I take leave of my senses and decide to reorganize my kitchen. I pull everything out of every cupboard so I can see the space it takes up. I play music, open a beer, and get excited about finding a smarter way to store all the things. And 9 hours later none of the things have found a home, and I am crying and drunk in another room because I just can’t face hefting the heavy food processor with its 700 parts into every single cabinet one by one only to find it won’t fit. AGAIN. Blame the beer. Blame my OCD. Blame my total lack of spatial cognizance. Maybe I just didn’t play enough Tetris.
The goal is to reverse the tide of clutter that creeps its way on top of things. Stand mixer on the counter. Cookbooks on the hutch. Case of wine on the table…well, you get the point. Even if some reshuffling is necessary when you need to use something, everything really needs a home inside a cabinet. Unless you live in a magazine your kitchen will never look that attractive with all your stuff just laying around, no matter how artfully. Also here in the real world things that sit out all the time risk getting dusty and if I so much as think about frying an egg a fog of atomized grease rolls over them.
That idiot stand mixer is back in the corner of the counter because it’s too tall and too heavy; either it lives there or gets demoted to a doorstop. Vegetables are exempt as well; I will forget they’re in a cabinet until the potato shoots start popping tiles up. I also have some bags of chips out, partly because it’s nice to have them accessible but mostly because I can’t find anywhere else to put them and believe me, I tried. I’m also banking a little bit on always having at least one dirty pan in the sink. Because if every pan in this house were clean at the same time hell will have frozen totally over and then we will just have to store that last pan in the oven. My food scale, which I use because I still have no earthly clue how much pasta is a serving, is such a strange shape that it had 7 or 8 foster spots before I found it a good home…somewhere. But other than all of that, my counters, table, and hutch are clear.
So now the kitchen is done until the compulsion strikes again in the spring or until I can’t find the salad spinner, whichever comes first. Thanksgiving may be an interesting meal. Here you go everybody, I had to cut the turkey into 9 pieces and roast each one in a menagerie of soup pots and pyrex because a few months ago I found some absolutely brilliant place to store the roasting pan.
Somewhere.
Kristina Watkins, Summit Sotheby's International Realty 