Retirement Update

Good Saturday morning!  We have snow this morning in the lovely town of Cobourg.  Not enough to use the stage two snowblower that we have yet, though, I’m afraid.

Since I have been finished work for almost three months, I thought I would provide a retirement update. I am still on my mission to re-organize stuff in the house.  I should point out that I am mostly meaning going through the stuff in closets, although the rearranging of furniture has been involved in the basement.

For those of you who don’t know my house, it is essentially a bungalow, with a mostly finished basement.  We have two bedrooms upstairs, along with the livingroom/diningroom/kitchen area, which is open concept.  Downstairs, we have another bedroom, an exercise room, rec room and office.  We also have three bathrooms, two upstairs and one downstairs.  My plan was to haul all the stuff out of the closets and get rid of what I can, and reorganize the rest.  This also included under the stairs and all the shelves in the utility room (the only unfinished room we have).

Okay, so that sets the scene.  In order to be able to actually relax in retirement, I wanted to declutter.  So that is my focus for this year.  I should point out that some of it I cannot do, because it is Cavan’s stuff (who knew you could have hundreds of different types and colors of computer cables?).  I should also mention that the garage needed to be done since I hadn’t been able to get the car into the garage since the first winter we were here.

So, garage done and the car in.  Cavan still needs to go through the boxes he got on shelves, but, we have room for the car.  Under the stairs is done and it now just hosts some boxes of stuff that belongs to my kids (including over 150 beanie babies!) and the Christmas decorations. The utility room is done, except for the work Cavan needs to do, which includes getting a server out of a box and mounted into the server rack, with the other servers and NAS boxes.

The new bookshelves in our little gym are done, which now includes the 32 empty cat bottles of wine in my collection.  The rec room is done--with all printers removed, I might add!  We also purchased and assembled a fireplace/TV stand, which makes it quite cozy.  The office is mostly done, but still needs a bit of work.  For me, it just needs some more filing of paper and for Cavan, it is organizing various computer bits like cables, monitors, etc.

I got the upstairs front closet done yesterday, noting just how many coats we own!  Some are going to charity, along with some other clothes that I have already pulled out of my wardrobe.  I will finish the clothing purge this weekend. I have put the lesser used items in the spare room closets.

So, lots done and yet a bit more to do--three upstairs closets, including the linen closet and the kitchen.  I have ordered two new Amish shaker cabinets, so I won’t do the kitchen until those have arrived, so I can organize it all at once.

If I get nothing but organizing and reading done this year, I shall be happy.  Next year, my focus will be organizing pictures.  My girls are in their mid twenties and yet, I still haven’t organized their school pictures.  I plan to scan the school pictures all in and create one big poster sized one with their post secondary graduation picture in the middle and the others all around it.  Next year.

It has been interesting to go from worrying about cyber security as a career, to just being concerned with what I have in my house, but I am loving the break!  AND, I am catching up on reading!

God bless you all and good luck with all of your home projects!