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February 13, 2006
A Simplyfying Plan
We have been doing a lot of thinking lately, and something we have decided to do is to simplify. One good thing about when we bought the house, is it went for very cheap. We can get double what we paid for it, easily.
So we decided to cut down some of our debt.
We figure if some people we have known, could sell their house, their car, and all their furnishings (how Brave!!) to come down here and help with the relief efforts for people they have never even met before, then I don?t see why we can't down-size so we could free up our time to give a greater hand in the relief efforts ourselves. Brian already is able to help out, but if he could work less, then he could truck more for relief efforts than for paying bills. Plus it would help both of us spend more time at some personal obligations that we both have.
Then too the highway our road is off, is in the near future going to be a four lane highway. Something we did not expect this small rural area to do when we moved here, is how fast it would grow. A neighboring town has doubled its population since Katrina. Our own neighborhood is seeing many more houses going up and fast too. The utility bills, along with everything else continue to rise. The pay does not. So all of this into consideration led us to consider this option.
Here's how we would like to do this...
A while back, we started building a guesthouse, so my mother in law could stay without having to rent a hotel room, since we had no ?guest room? for her to sleep here, we thought they would enjoy the guest house and it would give them a mini-vacation without the cost. Well she passed away before we could finish it, and so we never really finished it though we have thought about using it as an office, but Katrina changed those plans, and so we then decided to just fix it up as a sort of work shed. That being said we don?t really ever have any guests to justify the guest house idea anymore. But then we got to thinking, the shell of the guest house is almost finished. We wouldn?t need too much (relatively) to finish re-modeling our current house as well as finish off the guest house to live in. We were thinking of buying a few acres off the extra we get for the house and moving the guest house onto it. That?s the plan anyway, whether it will work or not, time will tell. But so far things have been falling into place well with that plan. Many of the supplies we have needed we are coming up with, either for nothing or for very little. For instance, the shingles were given to us by a neighbor awhile back, we used to haul ?used lumber? from New Orleans - pre Katrina - (we hauled it to save a company money, it cost them to throw the wood away) and have much of it still stored here, well Brian is planing some of it for pine floors for the guest house. And they are coming out beautiful! (Going to be playing with the stain tomorrow) Then we found interior doors at Lowes for only $10.00 each, they had water spots - nothing KILZ can't take care of, but the doors are not damaged. Now we have enough doors to re-do our current house and the "guest house" so as to have all matching doors.
By doing this plan we would have no mortgage note, and might even be able pay off our car note. At any rate we would have less utility bills and most likely more land, which we want anyway for cows and sheep - in the future. So though we would be down-sizing, I think it would be nice to have a ?clean slate? and a relatively debt-free one too. We hope that we can free up more time too by doing this.
I will continue to make updates to the changes we make for this house....but I will be in the future creating a new journal for the things we do to the little "guest house" we have affectionately dubbed our Little Dacha, which in Russian means "a country cottage used especially in the summer".
Comments (1)
bookyeti:Yay for simplifying! Simple is best. It truly is. It's not easy but is worth it in the long-run. We really need to get our wits about us, and do the same. We just can't wait to get settled down, finally.
I wish you all the best, dear sis, and all your endeavors. *hugs*
Posted by bookyeti | February 14, 2006 6:38 PM
Posted on February 14, 2006 18:38
