Decluttering and Decorating

Tomorrow is our 18th wedding anniversary. If we’re still married at the end of this process… well, that will be a good thing. We are averaging about one dispute a day. The ongoing issue now is how and when to sell this house.

We’ve gotten a lot of good advice about the new house, the old house and the transition from here to there. Among other things we’ve heard: have a garage sale, throw out everything and pack up at least half of your stuff- all good advice.

As soon as we came home from signing the contract, immediately everything in the house became suspect. Hmmmm, will this make it to the new house or should we toss it out now? This weekend we’ve tossed out bags and bags of trash and packed up about ten boxes of things that can be stored until we move, or in other words: future trash. Really, if we can live without it for nine months, then we could live without it forever. Storage is sort of a transition to trash area.

There are several ways to discard things that one no longer wants. We could save everything and have a garage sale. We could sell it all on Ebay. We could Freecycle it. Or we could just put it out next to the curb.

Today my mother warned me not to spend too much time thinking about the new house yet because it is going to be a long process. Then in the next breath she said, “Oh, that reminds me, I wanted to ask you about making cornices for the kids’ rooms.”

The kids are VERY excited about having their own rooms. If they could spend some time planning the new look, it would help them deal with waiting for the house to be finished. So, if we could have their bedding, window cornices and a color to paint one accent wall picked out before we move, we can get their space decorated pretty quickly. Charlie already knows that he wants an ocean theme. Mitchell wants to paint his room black, but he’s going to have to settle for some black accessories.

Speaking of black, Wednesday night about ten p.m., Charlie and I were driving home from Sea World. We saw the line of people waiting to see the Star Wars movie (which didn’t even begin until midnight) stretched all the way across the front of the Regal Cinemas and around the side of the building. Have you seen the movie yet? Personally, I think that the new movies are lacking a very important element: Han Solo.

Tomorrow is the first official day of summer around here. We are lucky. While Charlie and I were at Sea World, we met a woman from Fort Pierce. She said that they don’t get out of school until the end of June because they have to make up the 30 days they missed because of the hurricanes.

I still have four more weeks of summer classes to finish. If anybody has any ideas about the use of disguises in Shakespeare’s plays, let me know.

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It is about time!

This beginning actually is happening in the middle of our lives. After 12, no 13 years, of living with lots of people in a small townhouse we are building a new home! It will have more than twice the amount of square footage of our current home. Each of our four children will get their own room. Needless to say, everybody is very excited about our move. You can follow our ups and downs as we post updates about our newest adventure along with some of our older ones.

We are having a house built by Mercedes Homes in a community called Victoria Lakes. It is located on the Northside of Jacksonville. Since we've always lived on the Southside, this will be very different for us.

Why the Northside? Well, thanks for asking. You've heard the old real estate adage: location, location, location.... Well, forget that. In our case, it is price, bang for the buck and square footage. It is simple, really- we want the most house for our money and the developments on the Northside are comparable with Mandarin, except that they cost less.

I moved to Mandarin with my parents when I was in 4th grade. At the time, Mandarin was at the stage that the Northside is now- mostly undeveloped with beautiful views of the river and lots of land. State Road 13 (San Jose Blvd) was two lanes going south after 295. At night when we were driving home, my sister and I used to lay down in the backseat because there was nothing to look at.

So the plan is to build here now and in twenty years our kids will move to the just being developed area of town because the Northside is too crowded and expensive. Wait, I moved to Mandarin 30 years ago! We must be getting old...