We started our plan by targeting the most obvious causes of complexity.
We require tenants to make our mortgage payment while living in the style to which we have become accustomed.
Although I’m at loath to admit it, we might, possibly, have more animals that we, strictly speaking, need.
We then came up with a basic plan to address these issues: Sell the house and buy cheaper house (or rent) and re-home some of the animals.
Neither of these were easy choices, in fact I wrote some angsty stuff about the subject here:
and here:
Suffice to say we did eventually decide on the above course of action. From this then came The Three Months of Hell in which we asked our tenants to leave, wept with relief and then systematically removed everything they had cootified and replaced it with fresh new uncootied things.
Paradoxically, in order to get to the point where we can simplify by selling the house we had to devote an immense amount of both time and money into re-painting/re-carpeting/re-tiling and cleaning our walkout basement. Then we had to do the more normal stuff you do when trying to sell a house, such as have the north wall replaced (what do you mean you didn’t do that?) have a consultant come and tell us to put most of our crap in boxes and hide it (she then replaced it with her own crap which consists mainly of silk plants and tat), rearrange our furniture and buy thing like “show towels” and fancy bedding. We also hired a cleaning service to come weekly and a lawn service to see if the sad patchy thing we creatively call “a lawn” could be revived.
The last thing we did (since we have phenomenal views) is to have professional window cleaners come and clean every window in the house. This turned into quite the cosmic joke when two weeks later we had a huge hail storm that cause mud to splash about 12 feet up the side of house so that I had to go hose everything, including the formerly sparkly windows, down.
From the time we decided to ask the tenants to leave to the time the house was properly listed: 107 days.
You can see the listing here if you have a mind to do so:
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