Occam's Razor

It took about five and a half months of retirement but this morning when I woke up I realized had nothing pressing to do.

I guess that’s good. For much of these last months the pressing things were related to our pending relocation and mostly they involved fixing up our house. That work is mostly done. We got something of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval last week when our house stager came by to tour our house. It’s her job to make it attractive enough to draw a seller willing to pay top dollar. I was worried she’d want to bring in rented Ethan Allen furniture and make us move much of our furniture into storage, but there was none of that. She approved or at least could work with the furniture we have.

Her suggestions were for the most part easy to deal with: silver knobs and handles for the kitchen cabinets and lots of fluffy white towels for our bathrooms, which either she or our realtor will supply from their inventory. Our beds will need skirts around them. Perhaps the most onerous task is to get rid of the green trim in the living room, dining room and hallway. The green trim will become bright white, and that includes two doors painted green. Mostly she was positive. Our months of work have paid off. We’ll find out how well it worked around March 1, when our house will go on the market. If we get and accept an offer then a whole other process will start.

Already our home is becoming a house. Most of the personal items hanging from the wall have been put away. Possessions are moving into boxes that are getting stuffed into closets, probably not to be seen again until they are reopened in our new home. Furniture is getting moved around. Open space is what buyers want. So off went the valences that obscured the view of our deck, which makes our main floor now appear much larger than it is. Clutter like our coat tree is bad and we were instructed to hide it. Buyers must get the illusion of large and uncluttered open spaces, including kitchen countertops. Our many upgrades over the years are marketable. These include hardwood floors on the main level and granite countertops in the kitchen. The stager complemented us on our curb appeal and smiled when she saw our large backyard. It should appeal to someone or someones probably like us, just twenty or so years younger than us: someones with the time and money to tackle the endless tasks of keeping a house in good repair while actually living in it. I assume it would be a family with small children, but for some reason I imagine some gay or lesbian with lots of stuff buying the house instead.

Meanwhile our new home awaits construction. Nearly a month has passed since our last visit to Northampton Massachusetts where we will move but there has not been much progression on our attempt to get a house actually constructed. Both the builder and the architect inconveniently took two-week vacations during the holidays. The ground froze over while they went to warmer climates. The foundation is the first part of our house to go in. It doesn’t sound like frozen ground will keep us from having the foundation put in, but completion a P&S (purchase and sale) agreement has. We had to find a lawyer up there to represent us, and the owner of the plot is supposed to forward an agreement to our lawyer. It’s no big deal and it hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it doesn’t matter since we need to go up there again to have a meeting with the architect (now back in the snowbelt), and our amenities will certainly affect the price. In any event, we will need to find 5% of the assumed price when they start digging the basement, and any old check won’t do. It has to come from our credit union directly, because Massachusetts’s privacy laws prohibit the builder from seeing our account number.

There is a high probability that we will settle on the sale of our existing house long before the new house will be ready. This means we’ll have to live somewhere, so we’ll probably have to find temporary digs. We’ll likely move to some apartment or house near our new home, leaving much of our stuff in storage up there but unpacking quite a bit of it while we wait. The other possibility is that our house won’t sell for whatever reason. We will take all steps to prevent this of course, but it really has to sell if we are to pay for the bulk of the new house. Renting out the old house while buying the new is possible, but we’d need some sort of bridge loan. And it would raise the complexity of the whole relocation thing another notch.

All these things are in motion but at the moment not much of it requires our immediate attention. So today is something like a slack day, and it’s not the first. Last week we took in a Wednesday matinee. Apparently some theaters try to attract us people of leisure with discount Wednesdays tickets. That’s how we got to see The Imitation Game for $5.75 a ticket. It’s amazing how much less complicated living in Northern Virginia is when you can routinely get around outside of rush hour. It makes living around here almost pleasant.

I put out new versions of two open source programs that I have written. My consulting business continues to do well but at the moment there is not much in my work queue requiring immediate attention. When the weather cooperates I can get my daily walks in rather easily. I’m hitting the gym more often because most days are below freezing, but some days I take long walks in the cold air anyhow, bundled in my warmest coat, hat, scarf and gloves and with a podcast in my ears. I am contemplating starting a port of my two open source programs to a new platform, but finding the time to write my first app still is on the back burner, but something I want to do. It’s how I have fun, apparently. The idea is to sell an app or two, although most apps tend to languish, but hopefully it will generate some significant income worth the time invested.

In general, I am finding that retirement is good. I am still somewhat skeptical I can actually afford it, but a year or two of experience will prove it one way or the other. It’s not bad to bring in some income, but I do it mostly because I enjoy it, not because I have to do it. I want to stay busy and do stuff I enjoy but without feeling the pressure to make another mortgage or tuition payment. To find out if I succeed, keep reading these occasional retirement journal posts.