Our closing on the rental house is scheduled for tomorrow at 3:00pm! It is kind of a bummer that I made a payment on the house this month. When our first potential buyer fell through on April 1, I went ahead and made a payment. It reduced our payoff by a couple hundred dollars at the most, and the rest went to interest. If only I had known that we would be under contract, and have a closing scheduled within seventeen days. I could have saved that house payment…
The important thing is that we will be out of this house and no longer have that financial obligation, or have a rental home that is too large to manage. I may have mentioned in a previous post somewhere that the perfect rental is a two bedroom, two bath house. A four bedroom, two bath, three car garage, corner lot with lots of landscaping makes for a horrible responsibility to have for a rental…
As of 3:00pm tomorrow, it is gone from our lives!
I stopped by there yesterday and completely filled up my full size pickup and brought that up to our house. I still have about two truck loads of stuff to move, plus empty out the storage shed, plus cut all of my high dollar lumber into 6’ planks and store them in the loft in our garage, plus haul one or two truck-loads of junk to the 30 yard dumpster at the shop, plus some other things I can’t think of right now.
I also have to work at Intel tonight, and I have to set up the studio at the shop for a seminar tomorrow, and I have to complete payroll for Nemo’s by tomorrow, and who knows what else…

Life is hard, then you die… that is what an old t-shirt of mine said. That is how I am feeling right now (physically, not mentally). I am looking forward to getting a couple of good night’s sleep in a row. It is bad to try and move an industrial wood shop, close on a house, do taxes (for 2005 and 2007), complete payroll, work two full time jobs, raise three kids, fix crashed point of sale computers, and have parent-teacher conferences all in the same week. COMPLETE INSANITY!! But… I got it done, or will by the end of tomorrow at least. I am looking forward to spending time with Josh, Jonah, and Ethan this weekend with no impending responsibilities. We will go swimming at the Y, and they have been wanting to play baseball lately. I plan to take them to the park and hit some balls with them. We are also going to the zoo on Sunday. They just completed construction on a new exhibit section and they have a member’s only presentation on Sunday from 9:00 to 1:00.

We are rapidly approaching our one year anniversary for Nemo’s being open (April 26). It is also Tracy’s birthday! I am planning to put together some trivia about our first year and post it. I am going to take information from the blog for the first year, as well as photos, and have a hard back coffee table book made for Tracy. My whole reason for doing the blog was to keep a record of planning and construction, as well as operations, in order to create a book for Tracy. I think it would be fun to actually write a book about small business startup. There are some on the market, but they are ambiguous and pretty much unhelpful. They might say you need to think about a certain potential problem, but they do not go into any details of how to deal with a problem or challenge. Obviously, every problem will have a unique solution depending on your specific circumstances, Building Code requirements for your area, Health Dept requirements for your area, etc, etc. But, a book that shows you how to tackle and manage a problem or challenge is sorely needed. When you multiply that by the 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 serious challenges that arise while trying to build and open a small business, it gets a little difficult. Maybe I will write a book like that in my spare time…

Gotta run,
Take care,
JD