So Many Projects......So Little Time

Selling a house means completing the projects

So we are selling the house and that is real cool. It signals the end of one adventure and the beginning of another. I should have been more specific about the adventure in which I was interested. The biggest adventure now is the whirlwind of projects that must be completed prior to selling the house. None of them are BIG, but they all take time, and effort. So what kind of projects do we have? Well, as you can imagine, we have many projects that should make you envious.

First we have the joys of painting.
You see, with horses and other animals there are things that can go wrong with any paint job. You see horses like to chew and they really like to chew wood. This is alright when they are in their stalls, even though it is annoying and requires repair work; it is not alright when it is the trim on the house. You would think that one little taste would indicate that the the wood is painted and is not all that tasty. No, they have to taste the wood in several different locations in order to make sure that they are not missing some special tidbit. Needless to say, it means that I have to go out an touch up all the scrap marks that they have left for me.

Dirt Dabbers hate me.
Well with the painting on the outside completed, then the general step of house cleanup can begin. That means the removal of the dirt dabber nests that have shown up over the walls of the house, especially along the mortar sections surrounding the Austin stone. They also like to nest on the trim, under tables, under the grill, just about any place to which they can get. So that means we have to clean them up, and this requires knocking them down, spray washing the location, and in the case of the trim, you guessed it, touching up the paint.

Is that Hail Damage on your Roof?
No it is not really, the roof is just really old.
No look right there, there are a few shingles missing.
Yeah, you are right. That must have been the wind earlier in the week.
Fast forward one week
Well it looks like you have some damage on your roof and it needs to be replaced.
(Sounds of people groaning)

So while it is not a project I will personally complete, it is a project none the less. I am not clear when it will be done but it must be done.

So there you have it, the short list of the projects. These are the ones we have to deal with today; it does not include the 3 pages of 8 font type that Nancy has lined out for me to work on tomorrow.

So how about the immigration paperwork?
Well, we have all the papers together for to be submitted. We have the photos taken, and let me tell you that was a bit odd. So you would think, it is an immigration paper shuffle, therefore it must meant that we need passport style photos. Yeah, the problem is that Canada has some specific requirements regarding the size of the photos. The must be 35 mm x 45 mm and the distance form the top of your head to the bottom of your chin must be between 31mm and 36 mm. If you do not meet these requirements then you better rethink things. The UPS store was real nice and apparently they had done stuff for Canada previously because they were able to hit the mark. Granted the first run was way to dark, but the second attempt was much better.

With this done, tomorrow I get some paperwork that describes the job I have done for the last several years and then I send things off. Once sent, there is a little wait then I get to go through the joys of a physical examination. Once I know that the paperwork is in hand, I will schedule the physical and then await the arrival of the paperwork.

All in all it has not been too bad so far, but we are about to enter the waiting game and that may be where things come apart.

FLICKR anyone?
So, you may have noticed a new addition to the right side of the page. Yes that scrolling slideshow is a link to the Flickr site and you are all welcome to head that way and look at the photos I am posting up. I am starting to work on a FaceBook page as well to allow me to post things a bit less interesting or a little more tedious. It will also allow me to keep in touch with the lives of friends who are staying in Texas. I plan on getting all of the good horse photos up soon, and then I have a few more Ghana photos as well. I will continue to add video to the YouTube site as I have time to edit it. I do have some nice video of Nancy riding Cowboy and Olivia as well as some video of her driving Buddy. Ahh.......so many projects so little time.

SOLD to the Gentleman from San Antonio

And then there were four.......

We took Buddy to Tom's place two weeks ago and it was not four days later that we got a great call. Apparently a gentleman from San Antonio came up and visited Tom for most of the day and he was looking for a horse and carriage for his wife. She was beginning to learn to drive and he wanted a safe set up for her, and wouldn't you know it, we had just what he ordered.

We had originally purchased Buddy for Nancy in order to have a very good horse for her that knew enough about driving that she could learn and a would keep her safe while she did so. He was exactly the kind of horse she needed. He was not a hot tempered horse, in fact he frustrated her to a degree because he was not as sensitive to her cues as she would have liked. But that was not his purpose, he was to keep her safe and let her learn to drive. Well he is now headed off to teach someone else the same valuable lessons.

Garage sale....Another way to let go

Getting rid of stuff......

The minute that you make the decision to move, the amount of stuff you own suddenly seems to loom large. I am not sure if it is a quantum effect or not, but it is as if everything you own suddenly becomes heavy and cluttered. Maybe it is the decision to move that allows for a change in you point of view regarding the stuff that you own, but I can tell you it happens every time we move. In fact, it is clear to me that the the time line for a move is as follows.

9:00:00 AM Hey we really are about to move

9:00:01 AM My god we have to have a garage sale

So we have been engaged in the process of selling our stuff to folks who need it more than we do. The first garage sale was wild, and a little hectic.

You see, since we live in the middle of nowhere (as far as a garage sale is concerned) we needed to someone to host our garage sale. We needed someone who was having a garage sale and did not mind if a few squatters showed up to sell their stuff. Well as luck would have it, a co-worker was preparing for a garage sale in her neighborhood and in fact it was a neighborhood garage sale that they had every year. What a deal, we could tag along with a huge garage sale. The ads were already placed and so we were fired up and ready to sell our stuff. After speaking with some friends and borrowing a few folding tables we were ready to go.

My God how early did these people get up?
Now, when would you think people would show up for a garage sale? Roughly 7 am or so right? Well you would be one hour late if you through that, and so we got there at 6 am to lay stuff out and at 6:15 the old ones got out of their cars, armed with their flashlights and a keen sense of haggling, setting upon us in a frenzied buying spree.

It was insane, stuff was flying off the tables like crazy, people were making offers on thing that we had not had a chance to price. By the time the sun was up, 50% of the stuff belonged tp someone else. Things lagged for a bit and then the more sensible folks started arriving and they cleared out a lot more stuff, not all of it but pretty close. The things that did not sell were dropped at a charity garage sale on the way home so we felt pretty good when we got back home. It was neat to see the space in the house that suddenly showed up in the house once we started clearing things out.

Do you have anything to declare?
We felt pretty good about the sale, and though that we were doing really good until I learned a little something about taking your stuff across a border. It turns out that in order to successfully move your stuff across the border you have to declare everything that you are taking. Now that seems simple enough until you look at what they mean by declaring everything. They want us to list everything that we bring with us to Canada. Think about it for a moment, they mean everything...........

Well that puts things into a different perspective. I mean, do we really want this thing enough to list it on our manifest and estimate its value?

Suddenly there are so many things that we no longer need. Nancy got a whole new outlook on the personal effects and we have decided that we need to get rid of as much stuff as we possibly can. This means that we are returning things to family from whence they came, selling things that we have not used in over a year, and seriously looking at everything else. We have a garage sale scheduled for the coming weekend and another for April. Whatever is left will be going to the Belton Masonic Lodge garage sale in the spring. It is my sincere hope that we can fit everything that we are taking into a 24 foot U-Haul truck.

What about the horses?

Well, that is another story all together. We certainly have to sell a few horses in order to make the move. We have moved a few to new homes at this point, and we have a few more to move to make things easy. We sold Frankie to a nice lady from Georgetown who is using him to ride big trails all over the United States. She bought him on a Tuesday and had him out into a canyon on Friday.

The mini, Taunta, went to a family in west Bell county. Turns out it is the mother to one of my first OB-Gyn patients as a staff doctor and I had know of her love for minis for some time but just not put things together. Apparently she and Taunta are very happy together since Taunta reminds her of a horse she loved from a movie in her childhood and so she very much loves having Taunta in her barn.

This leaves us with a few more that need to find good homes. Buddy, the driving pony that Nancy has bee working with for the last year is not going to go with us to Canada. He is going back to Tom O'Carroll's Driving Center from whom we originally purchased him. We are selling the tack and the carriage that we have as well since they will not be needed once the horse is sold. It is not that Nancy will no longer be driving when she gets to Canada, she will likely be doing a different kind of driving when we get there. She is not so interested in doing the combined driving that she was doing with Tom, she is much more interested in pleasure driving and so we will likely get a completely different horse and carriage combination once we get settled into out new place.

The other horse that we absolutely have to sell is Bronte. She has proved a bit harder to move on down the line. She is an Appaloosa Arab cross and a mare which has combined to make her less desirable for folks. We have had her for sale off and on for 6 months and have only had a couple of people look at her and may be twice that many who have contacted us about her. It is as if people do not want a mare, rather they want a gelding. I am not sure why, but is is what seems to be occurring. Anyway we hope to sell her soon to someone, and if no one steps up, then we will take her to a reputable auction and sell her for whatever we get for her.

We have four horses left once we sell these two, and I am not sure if they will all move with us. Certainly we are taking Olivia and Cowboy, but hopefully we will sell Ophelia prior to the move, but the price is set in stone. She has been listed for a while and we have yet to hear from anyone about her. As for Aubry, he is likely to move with us, but it is not set in stone. He has been having quiet a bit of arthritis and the vets are telling us that he probably not do well with the cold, and he will certainly not be able to get out to pasture for several months of the year. Being stall bound 90% of the time from December through April will probably accelerate his arthritis.

I can't believe you are getting rid of all of that.......

So there it is, the long and the short of getting rid of our stuff. The reaction that people have to the very act of getting rid of all our stuff is fairly interesting. The group splits along the lines of folks who cannot imagine selling their stuff no matter what, and those who see it as replaceable junk that you can get more or less anywhere. I am very much in the later of these two groups since I do not have any problem selling everything that I do not absolutely need daily. I would be happy to have sold all the furniture so that the only thing we take with us is a bed. Nancy is a little more refined in her ideas about clearing things out, and she is happy to part with many things, but not the family treasures. I will be curious to see what we are left with when it is all said and done.

That is for now, more as things progress.......