One foot on the road to remodeling hell...
Come Tuesday, the money will be available. This house, after 40 years, shows the expected wear and tear that cheap construction and fixtures are bound to have. We didn't borrow enough to do everything we'd like to do so we are going to have to stay really focused and not wander off track. However much we might want that surround sound system, it's not part of the improvements we need so we can't buy it, no matter what the sale price might be.

Kitchen and bath are the first priority, but this is a small house with only one tiny bathroom so those home improvement shows that have folks living in one part of the house while the rest is under construction is not an accurate depiction of what will happen here. No, come destruction and construction time we will be living in our backyard in a tent, cooking on the grill, showering with the "sun shower" from our camping gear and using one of those portable toilets you see at construction sites or outdoor concerts. Needless to say, we will NOT being doing any of this next month when temps are as likely to be in the 30s as they are in the 70s. And Austin rarely has a spring season, so it's going to be a very tricky timing act. Start too early and we will freeze our asses off. Start too late and we'll be hot as hell. More than likely, if we schedule this for the "spring" then we'll be alternating between both as well as dealing with a lot of rain. Fortunately, Rob and I are old hands at camping and it's not going to be the ordeal for us that it might be for many other people. We have the advantage of a very large covered deck in our backyard which can be used for cooking, eating and hanging out in the evenings. In the event that we get one of those "horizontal" rain storms, we can put up tarps and still stay dry. Or retreat to the tent. Our tent is big enough to provide sleeping space for two adults and three dogs, a clothesrack, a TV, a computer and a small table. It's a BIG tent. As for cooking, in addition to years of extensive camping experience, we have also been without a working stove for a while and trust me, we can cook everything you might want to ever cook on our grill using charcoal or wood. In fact, the grill makes much better home-made pizza than the gas oven ever did.

But enough about the future. Let me tell you what's on the agenda for February which I'm sure is going to be a far bigger ordeal than the remodeling experience. We need to go through all our years of accumulated "stuff" and get rid of well over half of it. We have way too much "stuff". And I'm not talking furniture here. I have six computers, three of which are just gathering dust, an amazing number of broken keyboards, trackballs and mice, tons of software that I'll never use again complete with the original packaging/boxes (why am I hanging onto that first version of Microsoft Word which is a DOS version?) I have an old SCSI scanner that I never use, three old printers (also unused) and that's just the tip of the iceberg. We've got amps, drums, extra PA equipment, and guitars out the whazoo. The guitars aren't going anywhere, but I think we can shed some of this other stuff. Do we really need that commercial cassette dubbing thingie? We don't do cassettes anymore, it's all CDs these days. And then there's the paper trail. Boxes and boxes of bills and receipts and check copies and what-have-you. Yeah, keep it for seven years, but it's high time to go through it all and shred or burn what's older than that. I didn't have the sense to date mark any of the boxes and there's always those few things you need to keep past seven years (like a marriage license) which means sifting through all of it. Ugh. I get the feeling that February isn't near enough time to tackle all of this. I'm tempted to just rent a storage unit and ship all this crap over there and deal with it later... better yet, just leave it all there and add to it year after year until I'm dead and buried! Let the kid deal with it then, heheheheh....