Before we got married 11 years ago, we noticed that our lives were incredibly busy. But we reassured ourselves that life would slow down “after the wedding.” Since that time, we have not just been married for over a decade, but we have attended several other weddings all with the hope that this would be the marriage after which life would slow down. Eventually, it sunk in that life was not slowing down. While I still hold out a glimmer of hope, the truth is that life will only slow down once we make it slow down. Now is not that time.
First, my hubby has a busy job that he loves but that – on average – is well over 40 hours a week. Plus, I’ve been working about 20 hours a week. With six acres, five cats, a large house and ongoing renovations, that means there is little time leftover to enjoy the so-called good life. At this point, we still have three major projects on the list (the deck, our bathroom and a garage/driveway). While we are not doing the third ourselves, we are planning to do the first two and will need to pay for the third. And while we have whittled down our “small projects” list from 130 to 40, there are still 40 things on the list. None of the above accounts for daily stuff.
Right now, honestly, life can’t slow down all that much, but this summer should be a good milestone for us. Not only are we slated to replace our deck this summer, many of the to-do items on the small projects list should be naturally hacked off by the end of summer. My personal private goal? Be down to just the garage and our bathroom and at less than 20 projects on the list going into fall. Is that realistic? Hmm… maybe. It’s not far off. The big unknown is how much we will add to the list.
But I’m going to be completely candid here: I am ready for life to slow down. Granted, we need to work for a few more years to fund retirement and that will soak up a bunch of time. But if we can eliminate most of the weekend projects in the next year, we may just start to feel a little bit of relief. More than that? Well, I’m focused on the future and what all of this work now gets us later. There is this point – somewhere in what feels like a way-too-distant future right now – where we are both at least semi-retired and the house is done. I’d like that to be within the next two years. It may be more likely to be 4-5 years.
But just for a minute, I want to think about why life hasn’t slowed down. We used to have this somewhat misguided philosophy that life didn’t slow down because we had improperly thought what married life was like. Maybe a little piece of that was true, but not much. Nope. The real truth? When you do an entire gut-job renovation of your house, you need to be prepared that it will take a long time. In my case, I thought, “well, that’s why you hire a contractor.” But cost overruns and a desire to do certain things that were important to us meant that a contractor didn’t always make sense. Secondly, you have to fully understand each other’s goals. For me, I was focused on the end result. For my husband, the renovation was a chance to make things right from when they were done wrong. While those goals aren’t necessarily opposed, they are different. For example, I would have been happy with drywall left standing. For him? The drywall needed to come off to improve the insulation underneath. In the end, I’m not sorry we fixed the infrastructure but I never accounted for it in my schedule.
The other thing I believe we failed to consider was how our lifestyle would fit in with work, family and home demands. It’s easy to think about living simply; much harder to do it. To be good at what you do professionally, it takes commitment and neither of us would change that. But tying that in with out of town family, six acres and a large yard becomes tricky. There are times when you feel like you work all day to get the work from chest-high deep to thigh-high deep only to wake up the next morning and find it chin-high. It is tough.
And that’s why I also want to focus on the reward. Thinking modestly, in three years we could be at our sweet spot. If we have saved enough for retirement by then, we can simply let it grow while we work part-time. Working part-time will cover our daily expenses and without the pressure of saving for retirement, we can earn way less. That’s when the investments in geothermal, solar and fully renovating the house pay off. With less to spend money on – both for operating costs and improvements – we can live on very little. That means, we would both be working about 10-15 hours a week and that would give us time to be humans.
On the backside of that? Well, if the house is done by then, we can putter. There will always be a small project to do, but it won’t feel like the project – or the house – is taking all of our free time. Darryl can get back to Ironmans and huge gardens. I can get back to some better state of physical fitness myself and my favorite gig of home decorating. In between, we can cook together, enjoy some backyard fires in our new fireplace, play with our furry ones and go for long weekend bike rides.
Sometimes, three years feels like forever and at other times, it feels eminently doable. It’s a bit like being at mile 20 of the marathon. You know at that point that you’re going to make it; you just don’t know how pretty (or ugly) it’s going to be. More than anything, I hope to cross the finish line of our working careers with grace and confidence that we can let go of work and enjoy the next couple of decades as people. Now, a number of things have to fall in place for that and so it means a significant amount of vigilance on my part until we get there. But man, it could be, well, fabulous.
And that’s the final thought of my day as I prepare for a particularly busy day: what the future looks like. I can just imagine summer and morning coffee on the deck without the rush to get to work or to figure out what our weekend strategy is. In fall, I can imagine leisurely canning while also taking care of leaves and decorating the house and my adorable front and back decks. The holidays will be, of course, fabulous. For those years when we are home for Thanksgiving, I can picture making a from-scratch family dinner for 12, 14 or 16… whatever those numbers may be. If it’s Christmas, I can picture time spent getting our tree, having friends over and simply enjoying a glass of wine by the fire. In winter, my tropical escape at the end of the season will be enough to keep me going – and my retirement plans definitely include that! I’ll also ski with my sisters and go hiking with my husband. Spring will bring with it work in the yard and garden – it always does – but the satisfaction of a day spent outside.
Somewhere today, I need to dig deep and get to the motivation to grind out a very busy week with today being the most busy. But I’m giving myself the next five minutes to just daydream about what life will be like, both after the wedding and the retirement. Sigh.
The Yuppie Homesteader 