Just do it

It’s graduation time! Some of my friends are seeing their first-borns graduate from high school, and that brings with it all kinds of emotions. But others are seeing their babies graduate: take all the feels from the first-born’s graduation, expose them to whatever that bomb thing was that turned Carol Danvers into Captain Marvel (a story line I’m still not sure about), multiply that by a zillion and you almost scratch the surface of the crazy emotions you’ll have when you see your baby pick up that diploma.

That could just be me.

For you soon-to-be-empty nesters, be warned: when your baby moves out, you might do something crazy. Like redo the kitchen. Or re-purpose her bedroom into an office. Or get new carpet.

Or sell your house and move into an apartment. Because why just redo one room when you can sell them all?

When Rebecca moved into her apartment last fall, our house just seemed too empty. Heck, it didn’t seem it – it was too empty. What did we need with all that space for just the two of us? Besides, each time I’d go into the basement and see all that stuff we’d accumulated over our 26 years of marriage, I’d have heart palpitations. It seemed like this would be a good time to have a major purge.

Here’s something you should know about me: I am a major procrastinator. Oh, I put up a good front, looking all responsible, but unless I have a deadline, I am all kinds of distracted. That basement purge I was thinking about was never going to happen without an outside force moving it/me forward. So when I heard the real estate market was hot in DeWitt, I thought I’d found my outside force! If we sold the house, I’d have to clean out the basement.

I got all excited about selling and we started thinking about where we’d go next. And this fun apartment building caught our eye. And the thought of not doing yard work or dealing with snow gave me all kinds of warm fuzzies. And it would give us some freedom to explore what to do with our theater company.

We took the plunge and put the house on the market.

And it sold the first weekend.

And the new owners wanted occupancy in three weeks.

Talk about a deadline.

Twenty-six years of accumulated stuff all over our house had to be sorted. Decisions had to be made. Keep? Sell? Donate?

We cleared out our house in those three weeks like a bad furniture salesman: Everything had to go, go, go! Sean was a rock star - he worked like crazy and gave this procrastinator the shorter deadlines she needed to really make things happen. We got a storage unit for what I couldn’t quite part with (like my beloved kitchen table with indents of the Babe Ruth paper and multiplication facts) and some things the girls might still need, but we went from a 3,000 square foot, 5 bedroom house to 900 square foot, 2 bedroom apartment.

In. Three. Weeks.

And that, my friends, is the only way this procrastinator could have moved.

The fact that the deal fell through two days before closing but after we’d moved… well, more on that later.

To all you soon-to-be empty nesters, remember this: you may feel the need to do something major when the rooms of your house echo. You may think of all kinds of things you can do now that you’re the only one in the house. You may even think of moving.

And everyone's going to say, "Don't do anything rash. Take some time. Breathe."

But here's what I say: Make the plans to do whatever crazy thing you’re thinking of. Because why the heck not? The kids might not be thrilled that things are changing (sorry, Rebecca!) but this is no time to sit back and rest on the memories. Time to make new ones. I say that even after our deal fell through. Talk about new memories...

Besides, you just might find the motivation you need to clean out the basement.

This is what sold us - we love all the windows! Unfortunately, the girl didn't come with the apartment.

The kitchen, obviously before moving in.

The view right now.

I'm thankful for the engineer who drew this to scale so I could figure out where to put our furniture. He's a keeper.