Give me a year.

I saw a couple of old friends the other day as I was leaving the hair salon. For me, it was the first haircut I’d had in over a year, having generally been too busy to get one. For them? They were doing good work – planting flowers down Main Street in our little village to get the landscape ready for summer. My prevailing thought? Give me a year.

Right now, retirement is so fresh that I’m still working off the exhaustion from working. Plus, I do have my microbusiness and right now, it’s also a little busy. But the big reason? I feel like I’m going to need at least a year to figure out my new routine. As I told my husband last night, I feel like I have days when I have our you-know-what together and then we hit the slightest speed bump and our lives careen out of control again for a few days until I’m able to gather it all back together.

His response? We’re still working at our maximum capacity and we don’t have the wiggle room to adjust to a slight hiccup in the schedule.

For him, that’s obviously true. Outside of working 40+ hours per week, he was managing our floor project and then the garden project. Once the garden is “in” (and we only have beans to go) and we can pivot to maintenance, the garden really should settle down and create a little bit of capacity for him.

For me? I need a year, people.

Let me fully explain, lest you just think I’m lazy. While I work 10-12 hours per week, which is the perfect amount to feel productive and like a contributing member of society, I’m still in catchup mode after 11 years in this house of phoning it in. There is so much to do, settle, clean, repair, modify, etc., that it feels daily like a target-rich environment. And I do want to do it all – I just need time.

Take this week, for instance. I took the majority of our inside “grow operation” down on Sunday. What remains is one set of lights and insulation with four plant trays on it. And thankfully, all of the grow operation that was disassembled is now in the basement and neatly stored for next year. But… .

A number of things still need to be done. First, the work light and orange utility cord need to go back upstairs in the staging area to finish the floors. Then, some of the furniture and plants in the fireplace room need to be rearranged. They’ve been out of place since the floor operation started in January. Because we rolled from floors into grow ops, they stayed where they were to create room for the garden accoutrement. But now? They can finally go back to their homes. While it will only take an hour or so as I clean around everything, it’s just a task I haven’t made a lot of time to do.

And then there is the guest closet. That closet has been stuffed now for about two years. Why? It’s the overflow space. In the way back of that closet sits the doors for the upstairs bathroom shower that still needs to be installed. That’s how bad that closet is. It now needs to be unstuffed and the things that we no longer want need to go away. What we decide to keep also needs a permanent home. In fact, that’s a theme around here. No more temporary solutions. If we are keeping something, it gets a permanent home.

I could go on and on and room by room. After combining two houses when we got married and then embarking on a years-long whole house renovation, things got temporarily placed just about everywhere to keep the living spaces calm and quiet. Now? It’s time to pull those things out from their hiding spots, unbox everything that was boxed and make the call: stay or go. And if you stay, where’s your home, little buddy?

Then, there are the new routines I still have to fully assimilate. Taking on the whole yard was a challenge and I’m getting there. May is a killer when the yard grows like a weed and you have to mow every 4-5 days. Thankfully, in June it slows down to once a week. On top of that, there is my decision to get into shape and lose weight, which is primarily relying on good food choices and riding my bike.

Finally, there are those things that have been on my “dream” to-do list: finish my book, make a large painting for our fireplace room. I have only gotten as far as putting those items on the list of things to do. There is no timetable and it may be well beyond a year when I finally have the capacity to do those.

But you see, it makes sense now that I need a year to fully assimilate to my new life. Each season will bring a new set of tasks and projects from decorating for the holidays to shoveling snow to planting gardens. Compounding those tasks will be this legacy work of finding each of our possessions their permanent homes. And then, there are the leisure pursuits like getting into shape, making time for friends and family and my dream list to at least plan for.

I used to make fun of people who said they were busier in retirement than prior to. Mostly, that was me being envious. Now? I totally get it. It IS busy. There are just so many little things to do everyday that suddenly, it’s 3 p.m. and you’re wondering where the day went. And maybe I’m a little less strict with how I spend each minute vs. when I was tied to the corporate clock. I certainly make time for kitty snuggles and chats with my sister (who is also retired), but I rarely watch television and I limit my book reading to about an hour every other day, when I can fit it in.

But give me a year. I’m sure in a year that a multitude of things will converge to make life much smoother, not just for me but for our little family as well. First, by this time next year, our floors, doors and trim upstairs will be finished. Then, many good things can happen. Maybe most importantly is that we can clean and clear out a whole cache of construction materials in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. Plus, because any residual projects are much smaller in scope, we will be able to limit the time and space required for those projects, meaning that the whole house is never disrupted again. And then, in a year, I’ll have done at least 3-4 rounds of finding our possessions a home so that there will be fewer and fewer loose ends to worry about. In a year, I’ll also have more of a routine and each day and each season will require much less aforethought, allowing me – and our family – to be a little more efficient with time.

But perhaps the biggest of all: in a year, we will have a full year of life settling down. It’s true that I get our lives together long enough for a speed bump to send us all askew again right now, but very gradually I can see that those speed bumps are becoming smaller and farther apart. Soon, I hope to have the speed bumps happen just 3 or 4 times a year vs. 3 or 4 times a month and be barely noticeable when they do happen.

I’m actually quite confident that we will get there. But, I’m gonna need a year.