So, my three weeks off is coming to an end. It’s been an amazing whirlwind of activity that has moved us closer to our dream of the open road than the last few months combined.
This week was a slow return towards normalcy. I personally spent most of the week doing client work, cleaning email and getting business work taken care of after the craziness of the last two weeks. Kind of nice to write some code again. I didn’t think I would miss it so soon.
However, we also made some great progress on the house as well. The house exterior painting is almost complete. This includes the great new porch color which is really looking nice. We also managed to complete the sale of a few more of our remaining household goods. Things are really starting to look empty around the house …
The really big news of this week was that we went truck shopping this weekend. Thankfully, I was able to enlist the intelligent assistance of my auto-handy brother-in-law, James, for a long day of test driving a large number of extremely large trucks. We finally found our new tow vehicle! Meet Minerva, our 2012 F-250 Diesel Pickup Truck …
This is another one of those big milestones on our journey that seem to have made up the last three weeks. In the long term we hope Minerva will take us a long way down the roads we hope to travel and in the short term, it’s great to have a vehicle that can carry our remaining goods around to donate or store.
So, tomorrow I head back to the day job. We still have a lot of work left to do, including, painting the interior, replacing some flooring and remaining yard work and clean up. However, all of this seems so much more obtainable than when we started this dream a few months back. For awhile, our task list seemed like it stretched into eternity. Now, while there is still so much to do, we are feeling like we have a grasp on the project.
In closing, some sincere thank yous are in order to everyone that has helped us out for the last several weeks. In particular, thanks to my step-father Mark who has guided our construction efforts for the last three weeks. Without him, I’m sure the house would be in much worse shape than when we started. (And thank you to my mother, Hollis, for your advice and allowing us to borrow Mark during this busy time.) I also want to thank our house painter Kevin Jefcoat, who squeezed us in to his schedule on very short notice. I also want to thank my in-laws, Dan and Teresa, for providing us some great flooring for the house. Thank you to my stepkids, Alex and Gwen for being such a huge help setting up the estate sale (at 4 a.m.!). Ahead of schedule, thanks to my aunts, Seddie and Connie, for helping us with the interior painting. I also want to thank my employer for helping get me this time off for all of these projects. Also, a HUGE thank you to James for helping me pick out the perfect truck for our needs and offering to teach me about my new diesel acquisition. (And thank you to my sister-in-law Allie for letting us borrow James.)
We also want to extend a big thank you to everyone who dropped by our estate sale and everyone following along and cheering us on during the start of this big adventure. Your kind words and encouragement help more than you can know!