It's been a long time since my last post. Long. Long days, long nights. We started in April ... working on the house, on our businesses, on the trailer, on the woodshed. The list of things to do was enormous.
Get the trailer cleaned out ( we were using it as an office and bead studio). Get the water diverted so we could have running water in the trailer once the house was gone. Hook up sewer and water to the trailer. Add permanent power. Add a floor, ceiling, insulation, gyproc, lights etc to the woodshed. Attach the woodshed and trailer. Move into the trailer. Pack and sort 30 years of collections, yard sale finds, and "stuff". Buy a bus for storage. Remove all the seats. Carry all the furniture into the bus. Prep for a huge yard sale, make multiple trips to Value Village, keep packing. Bag up loads of garbage. Keep packing and sorting. Still packing and donating.
Run two businesses. Do the year end books for both. Expand one, change one. Sell off much of the stock from one. Start on line sales with one. Create an expanded seed shop. Bag up over 5000 bags of seeds. Work through two very busy spring and summer seasons. Keep on keeping on, lol.
Find not one but two stray pregnant cats, keep them, care for the babies, get the moms spayed and vetted, find homes for them, then vet the kittens and find them homes. A lot of extra litterbox scooping and cat chores ! Add that to the to-do list, lol.
And then ... the permit issues. We struggled for more than a month to get a building permit ... I don't even want to revisit that whole crazy scenario !!
Since April we have worked 7 days a week, all day at work then 3 or 4 hours at night either at home or at the house. So it's been almost five months of nose to the grindstone.
Behind the scenes there were all sorts of things going on, difficulties, family health issues, and more. Finally, at the beginning of August, we just decided that we were exhausted. We no longer had any excitement for the project. There was so much going on and we were overwhelmed. We just wanted to stop, breathe, worry about our people, and enjoy life for a few minutes. We didn't care about the house anymore ... we couldn't imagine 4 more months of construction and trying to beat the freezes and winter weather. We were worn out. SO ... we talked about it and pulled the plug on the project. We would wait until spring. Such a feeling of relief !!
So now we have plans to winterize the trailer. Our outdoor laundromat (at work) will move inside. If it gets too cold in the trailer, we'll move into the store. No big deal. As long as we have somewhere to sleep and make meals, we're fine. Actually, we're kind of excited ... it's another adventure !!
So now, we work at getting everything out of the house and hopefully having it torn down before winter. We will have time to work at our businesses, spend time with family, and maybe even take a day off ! Exciting.
