Changing My Thoughts

March, 2011


It’s been a long 8 months. After I won five new windows, saving us $5000, all hell broke loose. The windows are wonderful, but opening up the walls of the house revealed lots of damage. It’s an 85 year old house, but we didn’t expect to be replacing so much:

• The entire foundation
• Some of the walls
• Much of the framing
• The floor in one room
• All of the stucco
• Most of the wiring
• The roof

It’s been a miserable 8 months of living in construction and we’re spending our hard-earned retirement money like there’s no tomorrow, when in fact, we are intending to live a lot longer!

Something had to change, and the only change I can totally control is my attitude. Instead of waking up thinking this is awful, this is a disaster, this is stressful, this is a mess, I decided to think different thoughts. The first big advance was to think, “This is going to be a new house, and it’s costing only one third the price of a new house in our neighborhood!” Phew! That created a huge surge of positive energy.As the months dragged on and the project stalled because of rain, we started to feel very uncomfortable with the debt we were accumulating. By this time in our lives, we had thought we’d be debt free and instead we have more debt than we’ve ever had in our lives! Eventually, I realized that the Universe was giving us a push out of our nest and we could just fly to a new opportunity. We could sell the house and create a new adventure!

Talk about changing my thoughts. Since I became creative about our options, I am completely excited. Here are our current options:

1. We can sell this house and buy another house in a place we love where the cost of living is significantly lower. After paying off this reconstruction debt and paying cash for the new house, we’d be debt-free and even have money left over. What’s not to like about that?
2. We can sell this house and rent a place to live. The world is our limit – we can rent anyplace! Portland, Paris, or Pittsburgh. What would be fun?
3. We can keep this house and rent it out. Then we could buy an RV and travel all over North America and the travel and mortgage would be paid by the renters. When we come back, we can execute option 1 or 2!

Thoughts create our emotions which determine our actions that produce our results. I’ve moved from near despair to elation, practically over night. Let the adventures begin!