We moved onto our new pad on December 28th. Retama Village is a gated community for people 55 years and older( I know that we are not that old yet, but it was close enough). We have a clubhouse with a large kitchen, library, TV room and pool room. The grill station outside still needs to be hooked up to gas to be functional. They are also still working on the lap pool, wading pool and a jacuzzi, but it should be done in about four weeks. There is also a workout room with treadmills, bicycles and so on as well as a small laundromat and some craft rooms.
There is a meeting at 4 pm every Friday to welcome new arrivals, mingle for an hour with your neighbors as well as to get updates on the progress of the development. It took us about a week to get settle in with the rig and then realized that we should move it forward about 5 feet so that we have something like a patio behind the rig with some privacy when we want to sit outside. It was a lot easier then I thought and we did not have to unhook that much to be able to move. So what you see in the picture is us after the move.
The weather up until this week has been beautiful. It has been sunny, a little breezy and between 75 - 80 degrees in the daytime, so we decided to start on the coach house. It will have a full bathroom with sink, shower stall and toilet, a washer and dryer as well as a front room with air conditioner, TV and some furniture and tile floor. At first, we were going to do it ourselves, but then realized that we don't have that many tools with us anymore to get this done. The inside of our coach house has pretty much nothing done other then some pipes for water and septic. So we decided to hire a contractor to do the job.
So far they did the framing of the wall for the bathroom and opened up the ceiling in the front part of the coach house. We have learned by now that things down here in the south move a little bit slower then they did in New Jersey. But, other than that I would really like to have a washer and dryer again as soon as possible, we are not in a rush to get this done and a couple of days will not matter. The room will probably get used more in the spring when it gets hotter, since it will be easier to get it cooled down compare to the rig.
