we haven’t been on journey in a really, really, really long time. i never would have guessed that we would be completely immersed in land life weeks before our departure.
as i mentioned before, jr has been getting our house ready for renting. he has replaced both the front and back exterior doors (which included replacing a large portion of the floor ’cause it was water damaged and lots of custom carpentry) and insulated our crawl space in the past two weeks.
out with the old, in with the new!
i have been obsessively organizing and calling it packing! little did i know, that before i can pack stuff away, i gotta go through it and make sure it’s organized! once jr came to terms with this idea, he said i’m just doing our future selves a favor. i like looking at it that way, it justifies my putting pictures in chronological order.
i realized recently that we are big, hoarding pack rats and have been amazed by how much stuff we’ve accumulated. especially looking around and seeing how many “doubles” of things we have. one tape dispenser is not enough! five nail polishes? no way! mustard? we’ve got mustard! it feels great to rid ourselves of all of our excess stuff, but it’s stressful at the same time. we are fortunate to have an unused room in our rental house in which we are planning on storing our things. if it doesn’t fit, it’s gotta go.
-
- who needs this many jeans!?
-
- can you tell he used to be a plumber?
-
- why?
we’ve also had carpet put in upstairs and i must admit, it’s quite lovely. we’ve been doing things to our sweet house that we’ve wanted to do for years. it’s gonna be hard to leave.
jr, checking things off of his land list!
still lots to do before our estimated date of moving aboard (somewhere around the week of the 22nd)! and i tell you what, no amount of blog reading has prepared me for the tremendous amount of work clearing out our house has been. if you’re a future cruiser and you’re planning on keeping your house, IT SUCKS! it feels like such a fuss for such a short little vacation! i really, really, really miss our boat :(
Sailing Journey 
I feel your pain! We just spent the last several weeks moving aboard and the moving OUT of the house was much more difficult than the moving IN to the boat. All the sorting, and organizing, selling, second guessing…exhausting. I had not taken into account how long the process would take for us-and NO boat projects have gotten taken care of lately. But I haven’t missed one single thing that I got rid of yet, in fact I already wish I had slimmed down even more items. Good luck with the process, having that stowage room seems nice!
Deborah
Good to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel! Yup, and our boat has been SUPER neglected!
You’re about a year and a half ahead of us, so I’m enjoying learning through your experiences :) We too will be renting out our home when we leave. How are you guys going about finding renters? I’m not sure how we’ll do this as of yet. Also, I’m SO excited for you guys to take off, can’t wait to read about it!
Oh gosh! I’m nervous about how much learning we will be doing in the next few months! We are trying to handle the renting stuff on our own. Depositing $ in a bank account set up especially for this purpose. We also have 2 good friends with varying specialties who agreed to be our “handymen.” I started advertising locally (like list serves and stuff) and we just put it on a bigger, national site on Tuesday. If we can’t figure it out by October, we’ll probably hand it over to a management company. Might be better for piece of mind, but less $ toward the kitty! Thanks for reading, Jackie!
All part of the “Journey”.
best. name. ever.