OnePhatMan

Howdy. Long time no talk. How’ve you been?

I’ve been well, thanks. Busy, though. Very busy. We finally took the big step in a dream we’ve had for years, and bought a house out in the country, which we’re in the process of renovating before we move into it.

Years ago, before the spud was in high school, Robyn and I wanted to move out of the suburbs and to the country. We wanted some space, away from the all the hubbub, noise, and little kids running pell-mell through the neighborhood. Our desire was a country house and some land, for a whole lot less money than our cookie cutter suburb house.

What we ended up with — thanks to me and my rigid tastes in homes — was a smaller, more expensive suburban house on less land with more neighbors. And more little kids, only now they were playing in our yard and flowerbeds instead of just running around the neighborhood. We settled in where we are now and vowed to move to the country as soon as the spud graduated high school.

I’m good at screwing things up, you might say.

After a year in our current house, we started having a little belated buyer’s remorse. Screaming kids, loud traffic, and daily gridlock on the roads got old quickly. Thus began the talking again about “moving to the country.” Not Green Acres country, but a place with some room, no traffic, and no neighbors all up in our business. A spot for a pond, a nice garden, and a rambly old house with some character that we could mold into exactly what we wanted:

Our own little heaven on earth.

Fast forward to this year. The talk began again over the summer, because this is the spud’s last year in high school and we’ll no longer be shackled to Madison. Don’t get me wrong — Madison was and is a great town, but it’s getting overgrown by white flight or whatever they’re calling it this week. All the yuppies are moving out here. The houses are getting bigger and bigger and property costs continue to rise. A quarter of an acre costs $40,000. In the five years we’ve lived in this house, its value has gone up by a third.

Talk really ramped up in August, after our next door neighbor yelled at me for driving 20 mph while he was pushing his daughter down the middle of the road. I bought some books on living in the country and what’s entailed, because I’m a big believer in that book learnin’ stuff. I checked the MLS listings daily to see what was available, and sent links to Robyn so we could talk about exactly what we wanted and where we wanted it. Not, mind you, that our neighbor was running us off because he yelled at me, but because that was the straw that made us say, “we really want to get out of the suburbs and into the country. We want space. To hell with this.”

I went so far as to call the school board to see about what could be done to let the spud live outside the school district and still finish out her senior year in Madison’t high school. No problem, the woman there said. The superintendent has to approve it, but since she’s not trying to transfer in I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t.

I talked to our realtor.

We started driving around, looking at locations, to see what there was to be seen. One Saturday afternoon, we drove over to Smallville (a pseudonym), a tiny burg that’s convenient to Huntsville, Decatur, Athens, and Madison, because I’d found a little house on five acres that looked promising. As it turned out, the house was several miles beyond my self-imposed “house must be 30 minutes or less from work” area. It was too small, anyway.

On the way back to a main road, we passed a house with a For Sale By Owner (FSBO) sign in the front yard, which I pointed out to Robyn. We turned around, drove back by slowly, and decided we liked the looks of the house, but that it wasn’t on enough land. Still, Robyn wrote down the numbers because it can never hurt to check and see what they want.

I called when we got home, and set off a string of life-changing firecrackers. The current owner emailed me a lot of pictures, and we loved what we saw:

We wanted an old country farmhouse. The FSBO house was built in 1935, and had one owner until 2000. The current owners bought it from the estate, and began work. They replaced all the electrical stuff, all the plumbing, added insulation, sheetrocked a few rooms, added / converted a couple of rooms in the back, replaced all the windows with double-pane windows, put in a modern dishwasher and stove, built a 2-car garage with a big bonus room above, and put in new counters and cabinets.

We wanted a decent amount of space. The house is 2200 square feet, and sits on 4.5 acres.

We wanted a pond. It has a pond, although it’s small and almost dried up because of the current drought. It even had a duck, though something’s killed it now.

We wanted big trees, not crappy little Bradford Pear trees that snap like twigs if you breathe on them too hard. The FSBO house’s yard is loaded with MASSIVE trees, 75 feet or taller, including two very Poltergeist-y pecan trees out back.

We wanted a house with a little character, not another same-as-all-the-others subdivision house. All the floors in the FSBO house are hardwood (but two of the upstairs bedrooms have carpet over the wood), and most of the walls are either beadboard or stained pine planking. The nine-foot ceilings are also all wood. Everything about this house has character. There’s a well under the house, waiting for a pump to pull out water for the yard.

We came. We saw. We bought.

Because I’m a firm believer in pictures telling better than words, I’ve put together a complete walkthrough of the house, which you can see right here. We started the renovation process when we closed at the end of September, and plan to work on the house and property until early next year, at which point we’ll move from the ‘burbs to the country. That way, we make things like we want them before we move in, and the spud will only have to make the long drive to school for about a month.

After we made the offer in August, I promptly hurt my back lifting weights. A week later, I managed to hurt it again moving a toilet in our current house as part of a floor repair I was doing. Note to self: don’t hunch over when trying to get a toilet through a doorway. Also, take the tank off first and don’t try to carry the whole thing because you think you’re a stud. Other than the few days I took off during each injury, my workouts remained constant throughout August and September, although I stayed off the weights.

As it turns out, I’m still off the weights, but now it’s because of all the weight I’m lifting around the new house. Part of the renovation process involves clearing up the property, which means felling trees, clearing brush, pulling up old fence posts, digging up bushes, and moving a HUGE pile of old railroad ties. Fortunately, I have a new friend to help me with all this, but at the end of each day I spend working outside I’m dead on my feet, so I must be doing something right.

So, about that friend who helps me out. Want to see her?

Here, she just helped me dig a hole for a mailbox.

 

Even with a 6-foot mower, it took almost 3 hours to cut the back forty.

 

She’s there when I’m thinning out trees and making firewood…

 

…and she’s there to help when the wind knocks down a big one.

 

Her back is much stronger than mine…

 

…and she pops fenceposts out of the ground like a cork from a champagne bottle.

 

Though I struggle to get one on the loader, she carts the 200 pound
railroad ties (we found a pile of them in the brush) like they were nothing.

 

One morning’s work.

 

You don’t know what heavy is until you try to move tractor implements around. The lightest one weighs about 250 or 300 pounds. And that chain that’s so handy? It weighs about 30 pounds, and gets heavy quickly. So, while the tractor does the hardest part of the work, you get a real workout whenever you use it. I may not be lifting iron in the garage, but I’m sure as hell lifting it in the yard.

But there’s plenty of work inside, too. We generally spend the days outside, and the late afternoons / nights inside. So far, only one room is finished, but two more are nearly complete. Here are pictures of the before and after on what will be my room:

 

 

 

 

Hopefully you can see the character we knew was hiding under all that ugly. When we’re completely finished, the upstairs carpet will come out and a professional will be sanding and refinishing all the floors in the house.

In a nutshell, that’s what I’ve been doing for all of October. Sometimes it seems like it’s progressing slowly, but when I look back at what we’ve done over the last three weeks, I’m pleased. I stay sore pretty much all the time now, so I know something’s getting worked. While I’ve eliminated the weights for the next few months, I’m doing cardio 5 or 6 times a week, plus all the work at the new house.

During the week, we carry dinner with us when we’re going to work, but on the weekends, we generally eat a big breakfast at the restaurant up the road (I see why farmers eat such big breakfasts now. You burn it off in no time), sandwiches for lunch, then pick up something like KFC or BBQ on the way home at night. Because of this, I eliminated the junk food Fridays several weeks ago. My weight is back down to my original 200. It went up briefly by a few pounds before we closed on the house—I suspect a combination of worry eating and pain eating—then promptly fell back down once I kicked into high gear out there.

Life’s hectic, but grand, and I’m loving every minute of it, except for the minutes where I’m putting up crown molding. Those I hate.

---

The only reality we know is that which we perceive. Our outlook on life is formed by our past experiences, and everything going into our brains as “input” is filtered through that outlook. The way we react to any given situation is based on our perception of that situation. Change your perceptions, and you change your reality.

Think about it for a second. What’s your belief about people in general? Do you believe people are basically kind, helpful, and good, or do you believe they’re bad, out to “get” you, or even evil? Take a minute. Reflect on how you feel about others. My guess is that if you look back into your past, you can find specific examples to support your belief.

All beliefs are nothing more than a sense of certainty (faith, if you will) that some idea is “true”. These beliefs in turn form the filter that creates our realities. I used to believe that because I was so fat, I was worthless as a person and unlovable. Furthermore, I believed the stereotype that fat people are lazy, which in turn made me never want to get off my butt and do something.

We’re all the masters of our lives, and I contend that our beliefs and perceptions shape our destiny. What sort of destiny do you think I had when I believed I was worthless, lazy, and unlovable? I was doing nothing more than getting by, instead of designing a life worth living.

No more. Now I understand I’m in control, and that I can make my life whatever I want it to be.

There are two great words that can immediately start to transform our perceptions, and therefore our reality. These words are “I am”, and they carry a power like the world has never known.

I am lovable.

I am valuable.

I am hardworking.

Say them once, and you grin because you feel kind of stupid. Say them ten times, and you start to wonder if you’re going slightly batty. Say them a hundred times, and you start to believe them. Say them a thousand times, and they become your reality. I don’t think there’s any small significance to the fact that in the Bible, God referred to Himself as “I am”.

Your subconscious can create for you any reality you want, if you believe in yourself and take actions on your beliefs.

What kind of reality do you want?