Movin’ On Up

I am finally really, really close to getting my house ready to be listed for sale. Long-time readers will know I publicly declared selling my house as a goal in both 2013 and 2014.

But I didn’t pull it off.

This year I skipped my What’s on a Writer’s Bucket List post because, well, I was too embarrassed to drag that old promise out again. So I decided to just do it, and not talk about it. So far, so good. I’m down to the wire now, with an April 1 deadline for the sign to go up. April 1 was my dad’s birthday, and I swear he’s been shoring me up during this mad dash (um, crawl?) to embark on a new chapter in my life.

Because that’s what it represents for me.

For me, prepping a house for sale – this will be my sixth time – isn’t all about the sale, it’s just as much about moving. I’ve never been the type to say “If it’s supposed to happen, it’ll happen.” Ha! No way, baby, this place is going to sell or I’ll die trying. Anybody who’s lived in a home that’s on the market knows how tough it is to vacuum every day and follow the dog around to wipe up drool from the water bowl and Windex canine nose marks off the French doors. It takes commitment. To get through it, you have to visualize that SOLD sign.

And you have to get ready to reach the goal.

In the past couple of years I’ve had two garage sales, given away a ton of stuff, and carted that much more off to the thrift shops. I ditched every single unfinished project – like making pillows and beaded bracelets and who knows what else. And again this past six months I’ve rummaged through every single thing I own once again and put it through another “cut.” The question I asked was, “Do I care enough about this item to move it?” If the answer was no, well, you get the picture.

And now I’m scrubbing the scuff marks off walls and baseboards (hence the Magic Erasers) and vaccing up the Daddy Longlegs webs and cleaning tile grout. I’m exhausted. Sometimes at night I’m so tired I want to cry. And I know that every single person reading these words right now has been there before and will probably be in that place again. Not necessarily about moving, but about something.

I am not alone.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life that were beyond my skill set, and remodeling this property was one of them. But that’s an odd thing about taking on any overly-optimistic project: Once you’re committed, you can’t just give up. Well, you can, I suppose, but there’d be a huge financial loss involved if you walked away from a house. And as much as I’d like to think about giving up on certain projects, I decided a long time ago that if I let myself throw in the towel even once on something that really mattered, it might set an unfortunate precedent I couldn’t live with.

It’s sort of like – you got it! Writing books!

But you knew I was going to get here, didn’t you? Yeah, any big goal – like, for instance, writing books and self-publishing and learning to be a better writer AND learning the ins and outs of this crazy business – usually takes us beyond our current skill set. We’re forced to learn new things, to make mistakes and grow from them, and to work – HARD – to get where we want to go.

And sometimes it takes longer than we planned.

That’s right, but we don’t give up on our goals because we don’t reach them in the time frame we thought we would. No matter what kind of rollercoaster it puts our emotions through. Truth is, I’ve never done anything worth doing that didn’t have me feeling a bit sorry for myself at times, while it also brought huge satisfaction. I think the biggest challenge is to keep at it, day after day, one step at a time. That’s the way to keep from getting overwhelmed. That’s the way to keep moving forward.

This year I’ve honed my goals down to three major undertakings: Sell the house and find a wonderful, peaceful replacement residence, write three more books in my Gen Delacourt Mystery Series, and earn even a meager living wage from the sale of my books. Anybody got a little cabin the woods they want to lend me for the summer?

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