When Peter Buehner and Deborah Day first saw their current home in Nambé, they knew. It was 1995. “What we liked about this house is that sense of history,” Deborah recalls, “the valley, the people who have always been here, the agriculture.”

Great location, but realtors called it “the rat house” because it smelled so bad. “Horrible” is the word Deborah uses. The house had been vacant 20 years and on the market for a few. It was totally derelict, the roof leaked, and eight layers of linoleum covered mud floors. When Peter brought a friend and his wife to look at it, the woman asked, “Are you going to tear it down?” and wouldn’t set foot inside.

Yet the weird thing was Deborah and Peter shared the exact same vision of what to do, right off the bat. “We’ll open this into the entrance,” they said. “We’ll tear out the frame partitions and make a living and dining area out of three small rooms. It was amazing.”

“It was salvageable,” Peter says, “if you were out of your mind. We loved it.” They bought it from the family of Amalie Lopez. The ancestors built the original three rooms in 1885. It’s set on a hill just a stone’s throw from the house where my husband and I first lived in Nambé. April 1973, we cruised the dirt roads of the Pojoaque valley north of Santa Fe looking longingly at abandoned adobes. Adobes with no windows, no floors, and minimalist roofs, adobes we peeked into and said out loud, “Maybe we could live here and fix it up.”

Luckily we were steered to Al’s Drugs, where you could fill a prescription and buy some fresh eggs. Al sent us up the Nambé Road. There we would meet the Martinez family, make dear friends, haul water, have two babies, and learn basic New Mexican. Our three-room house had been restored, but it had no plumbing, wood heat, and a large hand-carved table that filled the kitchen. It was perfect.

This neighborhood—now Deborah and Peter’s neighborhood—was “in transition.” A parrot flew from a high-end house and heckled us in our low-end privy. Never in the Back East would you find an architect, a custodian, a doctor, a physicist, a hippie (that would be me), a carpenter, and a school bus driver living in hollering distance of one another.

 

 

 

Our first week, as I was painting the walls to freshen things up, I noticed lots of people walking by. I’d paint and marvel at all the pedestrians, not knowing that I had entered the real New Mexico on Holy Week, and this road led to El Santuario de Chimayó. These weren’t fitness walkers but actual pilgrims to that church. Thus began my love for things traditional and old adobe houses. I gravitate toward people who share this predilection. After reading the adventures of Peter and Deb, my most rabid adobe aficionados, you may be asking, is this madness or vision?

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