Last Friday (and this one too) we met our good friend and Realtor Cindy Martinez at The Point Sports Bar, a cool airy bar on the upper floor of the restaurant for a drink and then to Collettti’s Italian Restaurant for entertainment, drinks and Goat Cheese Terrine. For us t’s been great getting to know Cindy, s
he’s smart, gorgeous, funny, personable and a wonderful resource in many ways. We’re all thinking there are some future fun and business ventures together in the future!
All of this and trying to work as well. That’s right, not retired yet. I’ve got a fair number of customers who depend on me to keep their sites ranked and business coming in though the web.
There is one room in the house that we are actually using, it’s what we are calling the “extension”. It’s what used to be the garage but the last owner turned it into an extension, or an apartment. It’s certainly not in great shape but it DOES have electricity. So we are using it for both storage and my home based working space.
Nice, right?
Well one of the major issues was and still is to a degree, is the prevalence of creepy crawlers. The roaches aren’t too bad because they really don’t even show until the are dead. But because of spiders and such I decided to bug bomb the place . . . just couldn’t handle them all over the place.
So, I bombed the crap out of the place and walked into a grave yard the next day, dead roaches all over the place. Not little ones either, everything is big in Texas right?
So, had to move them to the side a bit just so we could walk in and out. 🙂
However, the point of the post is that with the house being closed up on itself for so long, the the bombing, i’s not exactly fresh air in here. The screen door for the sliding door we use to get in here was TOTALLY jacked and not working, and I couldn’t keep the slider shut all of the time.
So, ran down to home depot, picked one up for around $65, came back to the house and dropped it in there . . . and it didn’t fit. Easy enough to fix as they make them reversible. Took the half hour to do it right, got it back in there with the help of my very able assistant (thanks Vivian) and we are ready to roll.
I see that Vivian updated you about this morning . . . . so much fun. There I was, water shooting up to about my waste, wondering what the heck I was going to do. It all worked out in the end, so that’s good. :-).
This is not the easiest thing to do, totally upending everything because, well, why not. Totally goes to my needs to always be pushing the limits, always be growing, always be moving. But TOTALLY goes against the man,s sense of “protecting the family, being a good provider, being a stable provider” on and on. So a lot of inner tugs and pulls in different directions.
We lived in a great house, surrounded by great friends in a great community.
We now live in a camper next to an old busted up house that many people here are wondering why we would ever do such a thing.
Why indeed.
Both Viv and I have lived fairly rough lives, really. Long stories that neither of us often tell or speak of, but not easy lives. And I think it’s mostly because of that, we want to make a difference, a very positive difference. Certainly we could have done so in Colorado, but we felt a need to better our own financial situation at the same time. For me, it comes down to making sure Vivian will be taken care of for the rest of her life, no matter what ever happened to me, and I didn’t feel I could really do that in Fort Collins.
I am sure that many of the feelings we both get are the same type of feelings that the settlers had. Which settlers? It doesn’t matter, choose any of them. They all wanted more than what they felt they could achieve where they were. I don’t think I have ever really thought of it like that, but it fits.
All in all, we are pretty darn happy with what we have done and what we are about to do. Our contractors start phase one of Landscaping on Wed of this week and will soon start building our first building for us, a shed. More on that later.