Sailing Baby Blue

After tons of planning and hard work we have finally made it to the end of the first phase in our big scheme, and from here there's no turning back. Jon quit his job at the end of March to finish up our house projects and my last day of work was yesterday. Today we accepted an offer on our house. If all goes well we will be closing on May 22nd, and will promptly take off across the country with only what will fit inside (and on top of) our little Subaru. We are feeling so lucky that everything has fallen into place. Our timing in getting the house ready perfectly coincided with the housing market boom in Denver. The sale of the house will provide us with the funding we need to make our trip happen. I think what we've learned looking back on our attempts to fund our adventure, is that we couldn't have done it any other way. One of the biggest contributing factors to paying down our debt was having only one car for the last 4+ years. Which means that Jon has ridden his bi...

Little did I know, the first time we remodeled our kitchen was not going to be the last. Before our wedding in 2010, we bought new appliances, moved some doorways, and upgraded our counter top and flooring, so I thought our kitchen had successfully been updated (with the exception of that lime green paint). But after much debate and resistance on my part, we decided that we weren't done. If we wanted to get the maximum payoff from selling our house, we would need to put in new cabinets. Also, we weren't happy with the tile floor as the grout was continually cracking because the floor moves so much, and ripping out the cabinets would also mean we would need a new counter top. So, after my last ditch attempt to keep our costs low by only replacing the cabinet doors turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, we were off to Ikea for new cabinets. Jon took another week off of work and with his brother's help they also tackled some of the other little projects aro...