This is the year. The year that we will uproot our lives and careers, move onto a sailboat and sail to wherever the wind takes us. Before we can start planning our beach adventures, there is a lot of work to do, including small things like selling our house and launching the boat.
I quit my job just before Christmas. We celebrated my unemployment by removing Alaya’s stinky old toilet, black water tanks and clogged hoses the very next day. Paul, Lucas’ brother, was in town for the holidays and Grandma Mary’s funeral, so we put him to work with us too. We were very, very glad everything was frozen.
After we celebrated the holidays and honored Grandma Mary’s life, my new reality set in. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have to get up early for a job or school. My first major task was to renovate, with Lucas’ help, our mudroom. This task kept me busy as I adjusted to an unemployed life. We removed wallpaper, patched holes in the walls, and painted. In addition, Mike, my father-in-law and I put down new flooring in the kitchen and mudroom. We installed a new utility sink and built a bench and cabinets.
Lucas continued to work at Ford, traveling on calibration trips in January and February, calibrating projects for the American and European markets, which meant a lot of early morning phone calls from Germany. In our “free” time, we worked on a million other boat and house projects, plugging away at our massive sticky note list. Thanks to a crazy cheap ticket on Frontier, I even squeezed in a trip to Arizona with my family, a lovely break!
Once spring arrived, we had one more major house project to tackle…a new roof. Over Easter weekend, with the help of friends, family and neighbors, we removed two layers of old shingles and reshingled. It took us 5 full days. We finished roofing on Tuesday night with headlamps on. The very next day, our realtor came to take photos of the house and property. The house was listed on Thursday. We had open houses that weekend and were under contract by Monday. Phew!
But there was no rest for the weary, we immediately turned our attention to Alaya, we needed to get her in the water before we could move on. We had one month.
This is really fun to read.