What a Difference a Week Makes!

As of tomorrow, we will be in our new house for one week, and we are already out of money!  This has been an incredible week of change and surprises, so I hardly know where to begin.

I guess the first comment I can make is that miraculously, we are still alive, and we are still married.  Remodeling anything after age 45 puts both of those conditions in jeopardy.  I recounted in the last blog almost a week ago that we were about to close on the house.  The close went smoothly, and the moving in soon started.  The cleaning supplies that I bought came in very handy because filth is too gentle of a word for what we found in the house.  The house was not cleaned at all, and probably had not been cleaned for months.  Thankfully, most of the house was empty with the exception of a few things in the garage, three pictures of Jesus, and one of the Virgin Mary.  Suzanne, the guardian, said at the closing that the religious pictures were probably still on the wall because the daughters so badly ripped off their mother that they were too guilty to face Jesus, even in a picture.

I wanted to thoroughly clean the whole place before we moved in, but it was already late afternoon, so we had to move quickly if we were going to stay that first night in the house.  We did some preliminary sweeping (honestly, the floors changed color when we swept!) and while I clean the refrigerator -- which was moldy because the daughters turned it off and closed the door -- Rick tackled cleaning one bathroom enough to use it.  We were both so exhausted Monday evening that even the blow-up bed felt like an expensive bed in a five-star hotel.

Tuesday was our day to talk to contractors.  We had about half of the trailer unpacked when the first of four contractors came in.  We talked to two contractors about replacing the air conditioning/ heat pump/ insulation (HVAC) and duct work, and two contractors about replacing the broken garage door and door opener.  Neither of the HVAC guys quoted the same size equipment, so we were glad that we had scheduled a third HVAC contractor to give us a bid on Thursday!  We figured whichever contractor he agreed with must be on the right track for this size house. Every bid came in at more than we had planned for, so that was our first indication that the money would not last as long as we had thought it would.

Dining room wall with air conditioner removed.

Among all of the contactors trooping into the house, we somehow managed to unpack all of the trailer so we could return it on Tuesday evening.  The house had tubs of items everywhere.  We found the paper cups and plates so we could eat, but at least one meal per day was at a restaurant somewhere since our lives were in utter chaos.  We somewhat unpacked some of our clothes into the dresser drawers, setting up our first "bedroom" in the Florida room.  We did this because both real bedrooms in the house had creepy, smelly carpeting in them that we had ro remove before we would even think about sleeping in them.    The old woman who owned the house, Jackie, had a small white dog.  I swear that the dog must be totally bald by now since I swept up enough dog hair to cover a Great Dane or a fully-grown sheepdog!  We decided by the end of Tuesday that we needed to rent a dumpster if we were going to survive in this house.

Dining room with "temporary" wall.

Wednesday brought about the first real drain on the budget: the electrician.  We knew when we bought the house that the electrical panel needed to be changed out.  The house had a Federal Pacific panel which the electricians referred to as "Fire Potential" panel.  We had planned on spending about $2000 on getting the panel changed, some wiring done, and some service updates.  By the time the electricians were done, the bill had almost doubled.  However, in the process we had two good things happen:  the electicians helped us remove an old, heavy whole-house fan from the hallway ceiling, and they also helped us lift down a no-longer-necesssary wall air conditioning unit from the dining room.  The unit prevented us from opening the door in the kitchen fully.  The door opened into the laundry room/garage, and with the unit there, the door bumped into it every time.  By Sunday, the dining room looked like the second picture.

New Discoveries

As I reported yesterday, we took a quick peek at the house and made a few discoveries.  One was that the table pictured on the right was still in the back yard.  Another was that there seems to be some sort of stonework or patio under the leaves that litter the ground by the table.  When we finally have enough cool weather and some good rakes, perhaps we will find a lovely little concrete area in the back.

The fence in the picture does not look that good anymore.  It is very old, some of the boards are rotting, and it definitely needs to be replaced, but we were a little upset to see that some of the boards are now completely missing.  We know that the neighbor, Jim, wants to tear the fence down and replace it.  Technically, our survey showed that the whole fence really is 3 inches on his property, so I guess if he wants to tear it down, we could not fight it.  I would like to have a little chance to adjust to living in the house before we see it go, but with boards missing now, the fence is even more of an eyesore.

Rick went out this morning and opened the U-Haul trailer to see how all of our belongings survived this sometimes bouncy trip.  He has more courage than I!  Remarkably, he said that everything seemed to be where we had put it, and he saw no shifting or damage to any of the goods.  Good work, Rick and Lindsay!  Everything came through fine.

I was dead tired last night, but I was shocked when I rolled over this morning and saw 7:00 a.m. on the hotel clock!  Then I thought, "Oh, yeah.  That's right.  We are in eastern time now!"  I need to adjust my watch which will be easier to do than adjusting my body to this new schedule.

I will have to post more later, after we close on the house and have a chance to walk through it.  Right now, Rick is antsy to get out of this hotel room, so we are off to Sam's Club and Wal-Mart to buy LOTS of cleaning supplies!

Southern Exposure

After three days of blessedly uneventful travel, we have safely arrived at our hotel in Clearwater, Florida.  We are happy to be here, and we both agree that we do not care if we ever sit in the truck again!

Thanks to help from Lindsay, our packing of the trailer was almost completed by the end of the day on Thursday.  Rick built a rack in the trailer so we were able to load both of our "trikes" as well as all of the other things that I had assembled in the living room, basement, and garage.  For two weeks, as I added more and more to the stacks like a busy ant building an ant hill, Rick kept saying, "It's not all going to fit.  Figure out what you want to leave behind, because it won't all fit in that little trailer."  As it was, thanks to his building skills and Lindsay's fantastic spatial acuity, everything fit with room to spare!

Our adventure started on Friday after Rick got out of his last day of school for the semester. We left at approximately 4:00 p.m., traveling down Highway 41 on our way to Hwy. 151.  I started the driving since Rick was tired from school and needed a little time to "unwind."  The construction through Oshkosh was a bit white-knuckle, but I never hit anything nor did I scrape the truck!  I found that driving the truck with only a 12-foot trailer attached was a breeze compared to the 34- foot trailer we used to pull.  As we got closer to Madison, Rick took over the driving. My limit of driving in one stretch is 2.5 - 3 hours tops.  By that time my shoulders ache and my leg gets cramped.  Cruise control is great, but holding legs in a position to slam on the breaks, if need be,  can be tiresome.  As we crossed into Illinois, I resisted the urge to say, "Are we there yet?"  I thought that Rick might use me as a hood ornament if I did! Our dinner consisted of Subway sandwiches on the road. 

One of the smartest things that we did was to purchase an electronic cooler that plugs into the truck.  I wanted to keep my medication cold, and the cooler afforded us the luxury of adding sandwiches, yogurt, fresh fruit, and bottled water.  In the evening we brought the cooler into the motel and plugged it in to keep things fresh.  As temperatures climbed near 100 degrees this trip, having the cooler in the truck allowed us to stop, park for a bit, and not have to worry about my insulin going bad on me. 

We wanted to make progress through half of Illinois, so we pushed on until we reached Toscala which is south of Campaigne, IL.  Rick drove the last part, for which I am thankful.  Since my cataract surgery, my eyes are not the greatest on the highway after dark. (Dang, that sentence really makes me sound old!) I don't remember much of the hotel other than Rick complained that it smelled "old."  I hit the pillow and was too tired to even roll over the entire night.  Even Rick's snoring could not disturb me, and the deep sleep actually gave me renewed energy in the morning. 

We checked with Stephanie on that first drive down to get an updated national forecast.  The good Lord was with us because He sent the rain to the north and to the far south, leaving the middle of the country high and dry... no tornadoes, no gully-washers, nothing but sunshine and warm temperatures.  Naturally, since we have just frozen through the Wisconsin spring, we encountered temperatures on the way down that the locals said they "usually don't get until late July or August." Just our luck.  Montgomery, Alabama, reached 100 degrees.

Saturday we planned to drive from the middle of Illinois to southern Alabama, an 11 1/2 hour drive by the time we were done.  I started the drive through probably the most boring countryside I have seen since we once drove through Nebraska. (One can only tolerate wheat fields for so long...) Not that the greenery and countryside were not beautiful; they were.  But once again after seeing the same plowed fields and groves of trees for five hours in a row gets to be almost hypnotic.  I also have to admit that I never knew a state could be so long.  Illinois seemed to go on forever!  Even at 72 miles an hour (sh-h-h, don't tell), the hours dragged on. 

At one point after crossing into Alabama, we finally came upon a new sight: cows grazing in the field.  Rick was driving.  I said, "Look, genuine Alabama cows!"  Can you tell that the plowed fields were REALLY starting to get old?  We continued on, and about a minute later, we approached a truck that was pulling a livestock trailer.  Hanging out of the back of the trailer was a long, silky tail. 

"What is that?" Rick asked.

"That," I said, "is a genuine Alabama horse's ass!" And it was.  That part of the equine anatomy is all that we could see sticking out of the back of the trailer.  We decided to not follow too closely.

Today was a day of just anticipating the end of the journey.  I drove the first three hours, traveling through the panhandle of Florida before we started to head south.  We spent the time trying to anticipate what the house would look like.  Would any of the bushes be cut down?  Did the lawn service really mow the back lawn, or would it be three feet high?  Did the family really clean out the house, or would we have to move the previous owner's things OUT before we could move in?  What would we do first (after I removed the purple drapes, of course).  And most importantly, would greed win over lazy?

That last question had to do with the concrete and "broken" tile-insert patio table and benches that were in the back yard. They weigh a ton, and one of the benches had two broken legs, so it was lying on the ground.  Jennifer, our realtor, told us that those tables were really very expensive, so the question was this: would the owner's daughters be too lazy to drag the table out to a sale, or would greed overtake them enough to put in the effort? 

Today seemed to be never-ending even though it was one of our shorter travel days.  We got "lost" twice, so thank heavens for the Garmin.  Lindsay and Christopher borrowed it once, and Lindsay named the voice "Victoria" because she said the voice sounds the way a person named Victoria would talk.  So Victoria rescued us, and we somehow ended up at this hotel.  When we checked in, the clerk said, "You'll be staying just the one night."  Both Rick and I though, "We certainly hope so!" unless, of course, Gladys turned out to be such a disastrous mess that we would not be able to spend tomorrow night on the premises.

After check in, we left the hotel and had a little "dinner in the park." Publix Grocery store has a deli that makes the best sandwiches, so we bought two sandwiches and drove to a park for a picnic.  The temperatures were about 85 with a beautiful breeze blowing. Fantastic!  Then we drove for our first look at Gladys.  The updated report:

First, the grass has been cut (both front and back yard) and the overgrown bushes on the south side of the house have been cut.  We actually can see the windows on the south side of the house! In the back yard, at least 25 lily-like purplish-pink flowers are growing in various places in the back yard.  Oh, by the way, lazy won.  The table was still in the back yard.

The neighbor has cut down one and a half of our trees (no great loss since the trunk is on our side of the fence and the growth was all leaning over the fence hanging into his yard.)  The back fence looks a little worse for wear, so we will have to talk to the neighbor about that.  We know that he wants to take it down and to build a new one, and as long as he wants to do the work, that is fine with me.  Rick thinks the old one will come down and the new one won't get put up.  Time will tell...

A peek in the windows shows that most of the furniture has been moved out (the pool table has vacated the living room and the piano no longer serenades the geckos in the garage), but an old wing-backed maroon chair (minus the bottom cushion), some pillows, and a big, clunky, cabinet TV set grace the driveway in front of the garage door.  We suspect they left that garbage for us to dispose of. 

We face a tremendous amount of work.  Right now, Gladys looks like she went through 6 rounds in a fist fight 20 years ago, and we are not sure she was a winner.  But I can see the potential, so with our help, dedication, and lots of cash, maybe we can help the old doll win the next round.

A Month of Changes

I spent about 45 minutes this morning writing this post about the changes that we are experiencing, starting with the change to a new month today.  Unfortunately, I tried unsuccessfully to add a picture to the blog, and that "froze" the whole system for me.  I had no choice but to close down the entire computer, and thus I lost the whole post.  Remind me again, please, about how  technology is a great invention and a time-saver...

To recap my thoughts from this morning, we are looking forward to positive changes.  Our change of location hopefully will bring about better health and renewed energy.  Dunedin has two farmers' markets each week, so we want to frequent them often to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.  Since we will be ripping out the 1960's harvest gold built-in oven and the scary-looking cook-top, our mealtime choices will be limited to raw, microwaved, slow-cooked, or grilled.  We hope that this change in cooking will bring about a better diet.  Coupled with the amount of physical activity we will experience remodeling the house, we look forward to better health (as long as we do not strain something or keel over from the heat)!

This will be a summer of destruction for the house.  We plan to rip out the rotting screen vents in the eaves and replace them with aluminum vents.  That task will be an early morning job before the sun gets too hot.  We also need to call in professionals to remove a tree that is leaning over the house. The rest of the much-needed landscaping, alas, must wait for a future budget.

The remaining work will be inside, and much of the necessary work this summer we will have to hire done.  We need to totally update the electrical service, and completely put in new HVAC duct work, heat exchanger, and insulation. The pros can do those jobs.  We also need to hire someone to replace the garage door with a new hurricane-proof door.  Building codes in Florida are a whole new experience for us!

Personally, we will be ripping down two walls, taking out the main bathroom vanity and sink, removing the rough plastered bathroom interior walls, replacing toilets, building walls to frame in a laundry room, and taking out interior doors. We will replace two doors with new pocket doors for added room.  The biggest challenge will be removing the three 4x8 sliding glass doors between the living and Florida rooms.  Rick and I decided that rather than making numerous trips to the dump, we are just going to rent a dumpster for a few weeks.

A positive change will be new fixtures for the bathrooms (toilets and sinks), a new vanity that we made for the main bath, and getting the terrazzo floors redone.  When the floors are finished, they should, as Rick puts it, "shine like a marble floor in a fancy hotel."  Of course, before we get the floors redone, we need to rip out the carpets in both bedrooms,  the ugly, built-in bookcase in the master bedroom, and all of the lower cupboards in the kitchen.

Bonnie asked me if I was going to take out the purple drapes hanging between the living room and the Florida room in the first hour that I was in the house.  I assured her that as my first act of ownership, I would take all of the smelly draperies down within the first 15 minutes!

While much of the anticipated change this month will result in a partially dismantled house, all of the changes will ultimately be positive.  This is a new adventure, and we look forward to the changes and the challenges before us.

Today was my mother's 88th birthday, and to celebrate, Lindsay decided that her grandma should have a party.  Although my mother worried all week about food and drinks and silverware (none of which she was in charge of since Sue, Lindsay, and I were organizing the whole thing), I think that she was genuinely pleased with the results today.

I say "think" because with Mother, one never knows what really delights her.  She is the type of person who is not happy unless she can complain about something, and I think that she really has forgotten how to do much of anything other than to complain.  That has become her normal method of communication, and those of us who know her are used to her fretting by now. 

At any rate, she was surrounded by family and friends today, and that seemed to make her relatively happy.  She was by far not the oldest person in the room.  The winner in that category was my Godmother Ruth, who at age 96 was sharper mentally and physically than some of the others in attendance.  My Aunt Gertie also is older than Mom but only by 6 months.  Ruth and Gert get along better than the other older relatives who came, and the key to having a good old age was once again illustrated by their willingness to exercise and to control what they eat. Ruth told me that even at her age, she exercises every day.  She is thin, walks with assistance due to balance issues more than anything else, and she was pretty sharp mentally. She ate a small meal and was content. Those relatives who were overweight and couch-bound were far worse off. 

Rick declared on the way home that we MUST keep active if we want to have a good old age.  Although we cannot control what diseases might afflict us, we can  control how much we eat, what we eat, and how much physical activity we get.  The key to weight loss is well known: eat less than you burn off, and keep moving to stay strong and healthy. 

A healthy future is within my control, and I just hope that I am smart enough to learn from my elders and to keep moving toward a more promising future.  Genetics are on my side as far as longevity is concerned; who I am in my old age is still up to me.

The Latest Dirt

My mother told me yesterday that my grandfather Will, who apparently was a font of wisdom, used to say, "Company is good for a house."  What he meant by that was that when we expect company, we spend a great amount of time picking up and cleaning in the pretense that our homes always look that good.  Everyone buys into this myth because everyone is guilty of perpetrating it.

Yesterday, just because I could no longer stand to look at the crumbs under the kitchen table or the dust bunnies that skittered across my laminate floors, I cleaned my house to within an inch of its and my life.  Or I should say that I cleaned the den from top to bottom (so that we do not die of dust inhalation the first time I turn on the ceiling fan), and I did the same for the master bedroom.  The other rooms got a good sweeping and mopping in the hopes that we will survive with the rest until I finish packing what is stacked in the living room.  Those goods, of course, are staged to go into the U-Haul next week, destined for Florida.

Modern man is the one who screwed up this whole notion of clean.  God had the right idea.  He put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with good, rich dirt underneath their feet.  No need to sweep, and no need to pull out the trusty wet mop.  When something got too dirty, God sent the rain to hose it down.  No scrubbing necessary on Eve's part.  Food grew from the Earth (the original vegan diet), and fruit was plentiful on the trees.  What waste there was from what was consumed just got discarded in the bushes where it rotted and nourished the soil. Even human waste was deposited somewhere in the bushes to act as fertilizer.  Eve never laid hand on a toilet brush  or a can of Lysol.  No wonder they refer to the Garden as paradise.

Now that we messed everything up, we have this notion of having to make things clean.  I have been cleaning a house since I was a child back in the late fifties, and guess what -- the dirt just keeps coming back!  We drag it on on our feet, haul it in on our clothes, slough it off when we sleep, and generally make a mess of things each waking moment.  Adam and Eve did the same thing, but no one cared because it was all a part of nature.  Maybe if there had been more people around back then, Eve would have felt the need to trim the bushes for company, but I doubt that anyone would have noticed. 

I have to stop being so paranoid about dirt and trying to keep things picked up and clean. I am in the process of moving half og my household from storage in the basement to staging in the living room and garage.  Neither environment is spotlessly clean.  Dirt happens. And after all, if dirt was good enough for God, who am I to argue?

A Measure of Success

Why do we, as Americans, equate the accumulation of material possessions with success?  My primary task today is to start to sort and to stage boxes, furniture, and "things" that we want to take to Florida. As I look around my house and basement, I am absolutely astounded.

For the last 35 years, Rick and I have purchased enough material possessions to literally fill two homes.  We have, for many years, had a fairly lucrative lifestyle, so when we wanted something, we bought it.  And when we grew tired of something or our lifestyle changed, we did what ever other Midwestern couple does: we stored the goods in the basement.  Thirty-five years later, we have a full gym downstairs (that is not reflected in the size of my behind!), we have tables, lamps, dressers, book shelves, tools and more tools, bicycles, and boxes upon boxes of kitchen goods and other items from our hopefully soon-to-be-sold camper.

To illustrate how out-of-control our lifestyle has become, I need only to look at the hall closet that holds, among other things, six flashlights!  Who in this world needs six flashlights?  We are only two people.  If we each held one in each hand, we would still have an excess of two. I suppose I could tuck one under my arm facing backwards as I hold the other two, but does a person really need two headlights AND a tail light?   Maybe if I were outside walking at dusk such illumination would make sense, but I hardly think I need three lights to navigate through my kitchen.

Of course, the excess does not stop there.  I think I have the "Noah syndrome" because I seem to have many things in multiples of two:  two bicycles, two brooms, two bread pans, two cake pans, two pair of winter boots, and the list goes on.

At least with the Florida house, sanity may rule for a while as I scale back to one item per household.  Egad!  I just realized that I now have two houses! 

Is excess really a measure of success?  Why do we feel the need to have more than one of a useful item?  Will the world end if we only have one cake pan or one flashlight per person in the household? In watching the devastation that recent tornadoes have caused across this great land, I heard a person say, "The house is gone, but we are all still here.  Everything else can be replaced."  She was right.  Thousands of people are heartbroken to lose much of what they have worked for, but only people really count. Material goods can be replaced. 

Learning to live with less and to live simply is a lesson that Rick and I need to remember.  Our income is not what it once was, nor will it ever be again.  But we have more than enough worldly goods to get by, and the true measure of success, in my eyes, is being able to be content in living simply.

Building the Future

The last two days have been days of building. Yesterday Rick and I spent most of the day at Denmark building the vanity for our Florida main bathroom.  The glory of being married to a technical education teacher is that if we purchase the wood, we can go into the shop on the weekends and build whatever we want with a wonderful wood shop at our disposal.  Rick took dimensions for the new vanity when we were down in Florida in April, and he was able to draw the plans in CAD.  We purchased cherry wood for the face frame, drawers, and doors, and maple plywood for the rest.  We chose cherry because it is easy to work with even though we plan on painting the main vanity white.  Writing those words pains me since we are both opposed to painting any wood that has a good grain pattern, but in this case we think that cherry would look out of place against the floors if we chose to stain it. I want this house to be bright, clean, and filled with light.

We had already done the exterior and interior walls of the vanity and the drawer boxes. Yesterday we finished the face frame, toe kick, drawer fronts, and simple flat-panel doors.  We brought the component parts home because we are not going to assemble the vanity or have it painted until we get to Florida. Building the vanity gives us two advantages:  we can have exactly what we want (six full-extension drawers with double doors in the middle), and we can have it for a fraction of the cost.  We priced a similar vanity at an area cabinet shop for almost $3000, and even with expensive drawer slides, good wood, and pricey hardware, we will have a beautiful vanity for less than $1000.

We both would rather assemble the vanity here, but we are trying to move a household of essentials in a 12 foot trailer, so that particular piece will travel better flat, as will the beautiful cherry tables that Rick is in the process of making.  Our southern household is going to be decorated in "early American attic," -- a mixture of camp chairs, old lamps, ancient dressers, and blow up mattresses for now.  One set of tables will be resurrected from the basement since they were the first furniture we bought right after our marriage 35 years ago, and the other set of tables will be the ones we are building, circa 2011.

Today I tried to build a little organization into the stacks of files and office decorations that came home with me last Friday.  My goal was to get the paperwork filed so that I could have access in my upstairs office to the folders I think I may use in the fall.  The rest of the folders would be "inactive" files, stored in the basement, that I will have as backup if I ever am desperate enough to teach a one-credit vocational diploma class or a writing class again. If that urge ever does come, I will have to call good friends so they can talk me out of such foolishness.

As usual, my goals were greater than the time I had to fulfill them.  Other needs like laundry, baking bread to use up over-ripe bananas, trips to the grocery store, and calls to make appointments for later in the week all took up time.  I had a delightful lunch with my friend Bonnie whom I had neglected in trying to finish this last semester; however, that put me further behind in the paperwork.

Late afternoon found me building more toward the future. An appointment at the bank to close on our loan for the Florida house helped us step closer to that dream.  After dinner, I found a message from Cengage regarding my forthcoming contract with them -- once again building toward the future. In the midst of all that activity, the paperwork got little of my attention.

 But I guess that is what retirement is all about.  If goals exceed time, I will always have tomorrow.  My life for the past 29 years has revolved around paperwork-- either creating it, reading it, or grading it.  Now I have to deal with the consequences of those actions, and I will... but not until tomorrow.