Sailing to Suburbs

Holey Moley, have we been running like crazy these past few weeks!  Just when we think it will all slow down, we manage to add another layer to the fold and yet are some how managing to still stay afloat (pun intended).  Our lives right now look like the first round of Thanksgiving dinner with lots of little portions – or in our case projects – crowding every square inch of the plate.  Just when you think you couldn’t possibly fit anymore, another side dish is passed around and you somehow make room.  That’s what we’ve been doing… making room and preparing for bellyache that will inevitably come.

But let’s back up a bit.

These days we have been straddling both sides of the fence, splitting our time between Suburbs and Sailing.  Yes, we’re literally living up to our blog name.   How, you may ask?  Well, our renter has moved out of our house in the ‘burbs and we are busy spending most of our time as of late getting it all fancied up to put on the market.

Indeed, we have decided to sever all ties with our past lives and relinquish the final link to “what could have been”.  No more safety nets, my friends.  No more “Well, if this doesn’t work out, we always can sell the boat and move back into the house”. Oh no.  We are going.all.the.way.

Why?  Well, a few reasons.  First, we had a great renter who paid her rent on time and respected our house.  We’ve come to learn that this is not the norm with most rental situations and wanted to end in a high note with our experience.  Second, we don’t have that much equity in the house so we wanted to sell within the year to avoid the lovely capital gains tax our government imposes on real estate investments.  We bought in late 2009, so we don’t have that much equity, and any money we can save in NOT paying taxes is a huge plus for us.   Finally, when we took a good hard look at where we were headed in life, versus where we want to be, we realized that one day we will untie these lines for good!!

So how does this all tie in with us living up to our blog name? This was us two weeks ago:

We were endowed one of those wonderful spring days that is so warm, it makes the winter we just suffered thru melt like a distant memory.  What else to do but load up your boat with a bunch of friends and go for a sail for the first time in months.

We crossed under the bridge at the same time as this huge tanker.  We gave it a quick Google, and found out that it was the length of THREE football fields and was a vehicle carrier.  Crazy what the Internet can tell you…

Now flash to what our lives have been like this past week:

Raking, Seeding, Scraping, Spackling, Sanding, Painting….  More Painting….

Very different, no?

We have so much to do to get the house ready to sell. Not because it’s in bad shape, but because we are total perfectionists and want everything to be absolutely perfect on Opening Day.  We sold our last house in 19 days, in a down economy, for full listing price.  We like to set the bar high.

While I can’t imagine all of our time on the boat to be total playtime, we surprisingly found ourselves missing the boat more and more each day we remained on land.  It felt weird to have so much space and found ourselves living out of one room the way we do in the salon of our boat.

Does that mean we have finally grown our sea legs?

Tonight we’re back on the boat replacing the 4 marine batteries that have decided to give up on us (we’ll save that for another post, another time).  And just when life threw us another layer, I looked out at the creek and saw this: a glimpse into our future adventures to come.  This is literally the same boat as ours… can’t get more real than that!