Look Out 2011 Here We Come

Thursday night last week Connie and I reviewed our plans and talked about the best way to get where we want to be by the end 2011.

First on the agenda is selling the house. We have some molding to put up, painting to be done and two bathrooms to update. Our original plans were to completely renovate the baths. We have decided for the sake of expediency and expense we are just going to refinish the vanities and showers and replace the hardware, faucets and flooring. I think we can get all that done by March 1st. The house will be ready for the market just in time for the spring break buyers.

The next thing we discussed was my retirement date. The plan now is to retire when the house sells. I had been figuring on May 31st but I guess it would be foolish to retire before we sell the house. Maybe I'll get lucky and the house will sell right away(fingers crossed).  My retirement income is certainly going to be a lot less than I make working so why give up the extra money prematurely. Connie will still be working so Sam and I would just be hanging out waiting for her to get home every day anyway.

Finally we discussed what we are looking for in a home base. I think we are both pretty much in agreement as far as what is important and what is less so. We both want to be in the country, wooded acreage preferably with a stream or pond. The actual house doesn’t have to be that much as long as it has good bones. One thing I’ve learned in all the moves we have made is that we will change things and upgrade things no matter what we start with. 

Connie, Sam and I spent the last day of 2010 on a road trip. The kids want us to look for a new home base closer to them. We drove all over west Galveston County and Brazoria County looking at some properties and looking for areas that we might be interested in.

It is all coastal plains and although it is beautiful in its own right it is just not what we want. It is flat, the trees are scrub oaks or tallows. We want rolling hills and thick woods. If we were planning on raising livestock the coastal prairie would be perfect but neither of us is interested in a new career as a rancher. Veterinarians are expensive enough for dogs and cats I hate to think about what it would be for horses or cows.

So I think we have decided that as much as we would love to be close to them the kids are going to have to get used to the idea that we will be a couple of hours away.  Jackie seems to think we're invalids already and she will have to look out for us.  Not the case yet sweetheart.

Saturday we started sorting through “stuff”. It quickly became apparent that we had a problem. Since we don’t really know how big or where the new home base will be we don’t know what "stuff" we will want to take with us. We have "stuff" we know we will sell and "stuff" we can donate or throw out now. The problem is we have no place to keep all this "stuff" until houses are sold and bought and garage sales scheduled. We want to stage the house for sale but there is not really anywhere to store anything. The attic is full and the garage isn’t far behind. They both need to be purged also.  You don't really realize how much "stuff" you accumulate until you start trying to purge it.

We made the decision to rent a climate controlled storage unit and buy a bunch of storage bins. Monday I was able to find a small unit (5x10x8) about a mile from the house. It is cheaper than I expected at only $59 a month and is a month to month deal with no long term lease. Now we can sort by keep, sell, donate and box it up and store it until we’ve gone through the whole house.

It feels good to have a solid plan and now we have a set direction with which to proceed. Let the fun begin!


Adios for now, enjoy life.


--Rod