So, an update on our lives: we’ve been to Arizona and California for the holidays, which was fun but perhaps a bit too long of a trip.
By the end of it (three weeks in all), I’d packed and unpacked so many times (because there were actually four trips in one) that I couldn’t even find a pair of underwear, clean or otherwise, to save my life. We decided that next time we need to a) stay only two weeks, and b) buy less stuff while we’re down there. When we packed the truck up for the final time, we were shocked and amazed to see that all of our crap filled up the entire bed of the truck plus the majority of the backseat. At this rate we’ll never be able to have a second child simply because there won’t be room for her.
It’s also not very eco-friendly or minimalistic of us to acquire so much stuff. So there’s another reason to avoid it.
While we were gone our contractor friend renovated our kitchen for us. It’s a mess right now and not completely finished yet, but I will endeavour to post photos shortly. We didn’t make a lot of changes, but the ones we did were very worthwhile: subway tile backsplash, new deep granite-looking sink, changed a nasty over-the-range hood for a shiny new microwave, and replaced old formica countertop with a more updated one. (In my dream world I would’ve gone with butcher block, but the entire point of this was to get our house updated enough to sell, and butcher block is not for everyone, so we decided against spending the money on it at this point.)
Oh, did you catch that? We want to sell our house! In fact, it’s an official goal of the Fairbanks family in 2015: Sell our house. A sub-goal is to have it listed (privately at first and then with a realtor if necessary) by February 1st.
We have tossed this idea around for several years, and finally we have made enough updates and improvements to feel like it might actually have a chance of selling. Now that we’ve officially committed ourselves to the cause, we can basically talk of nothing else. Our plan is to sell the house, move to the nearby bigger city (about 30 minutes away from Mayberry here), and rent for awhile, saving the equity from the (hopeful) sale of the house to buy a small (super-small) fixer upper with (again, hopefully) nothing but cash. It will take time and patience to find the house of our debt-free dreams, but we are willing to wait. As my Grandpa Leavitt used to say: there’s a deal a day.
So that’s our plan for 2015. Other than that, it’s business as usual: Hutch is a tiny little destructor, gleefully tearing things apart wherever he goes. I do my best (and usually fail miserably) to follow behind him and pick up the pieces. Poor Kyle is working where he’s always worked, I’m working where I’ve always worked, it’s snowy as all get-out here in Mayberry, and all is right in the world.
