Not so sexy...

Of course there are a couple of things involved in moving that are not so sexy and fun.  First and foremost is selling the home you are in and if you do, what do you do with all of the things that you have accumulated while in that home, in your married life together, and perhaps things you have from growing up.  Don't forget that your kids have accumulated things as well and may not have anywhere to store them.

The selling was pretty easy, once we made the decision to actually build a new home in Marquette.  I woke up in the middle of the night in April in a panic, realizing if we were going to do this, we needed to get going.  Homes don't sell as well in the fall and winter as they do in the spring and summer.  April is already spring.  Panic. 

We have dear friends who sold their house on their own without a realtor, but I just could not see us doing that.  Carol was teaching full time and I was retired from the classroom, but still coaching softball.  Besides being busy, selling a home was not exactly a skill set that we felt we had.  Even though it would cost us 6%, we went ahead with the agency and managed to get the same person who sold us the house thirty years before.

We got the house ready for our meeting with her and since we had done quite a few improvements and additions since we bought it, she was pleased.  Since we had a fire two years earlier, the kitchen was significantly upgraded and modernized.  We also had what few homes have in Sitka: a large, 1/2 acre lot.  In discussing asking price, the realtor suggested nearly 50% more that we ever envisioned getting and in exactly five days from the first meeting we had, we had gotten an offer of 90% of that asking price: insane.  So for us, the realtor, even at the price we paid, was well worth it.

Getting the house 'ready' required an inspection and work to be done... pretty easy.  But to actually reduce all of our stuff to an amount that would fit in our soon to be small, three bedroom duplex (plus a heated, though leaky storage unit.  What do you keep?  What do you toss?  We followed a variation on "If it gives you joy, keep it."  Well, if you really follow that philosophy, it is surprising how little you will keep.  But in our case, it was still surprising how much we kept.

It was certainly motivational to get rid of everything from clothing to artwork to furniture.  Everything had to be looked at critically and had to meet some criteria for keeping and moving.  It turned out that we threw away nearly 3,000 pounds of items collected within our house.  After the second cut, a year later, another 1,000 pounds were thrown away and nearly 6,000 pounds of things were packed into 'cubes' for shipping.  The math tells me that we had 10,000 pounds or five tons of stuff.  That is a little crazy.  I would bet that we were on the low side of stuff that is owned. 

One thing that helped with 'old stuff' was the ability to take a digital photo of it and then chuck it. However, the leather jacket that I bought at a huge sale at the Michigan State Fair grounds in 1976 for $140.  That bad boy is still mint and I could not part with it.  It still fits!  It is double breasted!  It's a beauty!  It is in a tote, waiting to be sent somehow to Michigan.  The league championship jacket from the basketball team that I was the assistant coach for in 1988 is also still in my possession, but it made it into the original shipment and is already in Michigan.  All of Carol's spare cloth for quilting also made it.  It may have been the heaviest tote we had.  She claims it will save us money in the long run.  I wish I could say the same about my badass leather jacket.

Decisions, decisions

Decisions, decisions

Really there was no decision to make for if we were going to move, it was a matter of timing.  But Sitka through a big wrench into that clock.  A career, a family, those kids growing up and needing a home base, and Matt Hunter all had a hand in Sitka being our home for thirty years.

I won’t dwell on those these, but I have to say that it was a great place to raise children, my co-workers became my Alaska family, and former student Matt Hunter asked if I would consider running for the City Assembly.  The timing was just right though as Mik needed somewhere to stay while he finished his work on his Masters in the Art of Teaching last year.  Stefania having a nice job with Allen Marine also complicated things, but she has been very supportive of our chasing our dream to move to the shores of Lake Superior.

So really the timing was great to look at summer/fall of 2018, finishing my Assembly term, for our relocation.  What needed to be done was decide what our new home would look like, outside and in.  We had always wanted a log home and it just a matter of figuring out how to make that happen.  The internet was a great way to start.

We found that there are a lot of companies that create log homes across the country.  There was one that stood out as it was near our property and it used local trees from the Hiawatha National Forest of the Upper Peninsula: Hiawatha Log Homes.  An email got me a hard copy of their stock designs, I guess in late 2015.  There was also an ecopy that we could access whenever.  None of the stock designs quite made it.  But some were close.  We actually started with a stock design and then made some major changes to it in number of bedrooms and the creation of a great room.  This turned out to be a great decision.  It was a really long, collaborative process between us and was mostly fun, but occasionally frustrating, I am sure for both of us.  

What was particularly interesting is how the work together, discussions, agreements and disagreements really brought us closer together.  It injected new vitality into virtually every aspect of our lives.  Had the thought of living on an island with 14 miles of road perhaps affected us in ways we had not noticed?  Did we, in our late 50s ‘need’ a change, in this case a significant one?  As they say in Marquette, “You betcha, Honey!” 

That design we put together had to get translated to a price, taking into consideration the size of logs; we decided on the largest available, twelve-inch.  Again, a good decision for both appearance and for r-value, as log homes do not have insulation besides the logs.  Spendy… but only about 20% of the eventual total cost.  Yeesh.  But it is really kind of cool to get exactly what we want.

You're What?!?!!?

You’re what?!?!

If I am lucky, I am two-thirds of the way through my life.  If I am really lucky, a little less so.  At age sixty there is a lengthy list of things that you should not be contemplating or doing.  Pulling up stakes from the your home of thirty-two years is probably one of them.  Today is day one of that journey and I thought it might be fun for me to write about it and share the experience.  I did this when I had both of my knees replaced two and a half years ago and except for the ones written under the influence of drugs, it was pretty good.  I hope that I can do the same again.

Planting the seed-

While growing up in the Detroit, Michigan area, both Carol and I, independently grew and affinity for the out of doors.  “Up North” was always and attraction as that was where the wilds of Michigan were.  This does not count the “Call of the Wild” museum along I-75, which to my child eyes appeared to be a wondrous place where you could watch deer, elk, bears, and wild turkeys frolic.  After what much have been years of badgering my parents to stop on our yearly sojourns on lake side vacations, I was crushed to find that all of the creatures of the forest contained therein had been killed, stuffed, and placed in believable, but clearly contrived poses around a rather small area.  Ouch.

But the love of “Up North” continued unabated.  We spend some time together there prior to our marriage, with Carol even spending the summer in the shadow of “Mighty Mac,” the Mackinaw Bridge, spanning the straits separating the lower and upper peninsulas.  Quick weekend visits were punctuated with drives through the woods,  camping in the yard of here housing unit, and even an intrepid midnight skinny dip at Wilderness State Park.  But then we got really crazy.

Really crazy was moving to Alaska “for a year” until it “got out of Bob’s system” according to Carol’s mom.  Little did she know that Carol was probably the real driving force to this near 4,000 mile move to the Yupik Eskimo village of Eek.  I shall not dwell there as that is not what this blog is about.  I will say that after a stop in Metlakatla, five years after our arrival in Alaska, we found ourselves in what would become our home for over three decades.  We would have and raise three great children, have wonderful careers in education, and make a few, family-like, friends.  Five years after mine and four years after Carol’s retirement, we decided it was time to once again visit crazy-town and go south to move, “Up North”.

The place was settled in 1989, nearly thirty years ago.  We had been looking for property somewhere in the state or in nearby Canada for a while.  Either our finances did not match up with the property or the property did not match up with our desires.  Finally, while traveling with a skunk-struck pitbull named Ikiq (Ick-yick) I found thirty acres for sale outside of Marquette, Michigan, across M-28 from Lake Superior… the lake it is said, that never gives up her dead.  Inquiries found that the sellers were out of state, has owned the property for some time and we willing to subdivide it into something we could afford.  After loaning myself the money from our retirement accounts, we became the proud owners of ten acres of wooded property in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  We now had land, “Up North”!