Mission: Renovation

Desi met with the realtor this past Friday and although the news was good it was not as good as we had hoped.  We've decided we can't, and shouldn't, sell our Seattle home in this market and that we have no choice but to hire a property manager and turn it into a rental property while we're in Puerto Rico.  Desi plans on speaking with some property managers this week and hiring one by the end of the week.  We'll then spend the month of May getting our house ready to rent.  We've got to depersonalize the place, paint it, finish some unfinished projects and get rid of a lot of clutter. 

This weekend we've already replaced all the kitchen cabinet hardware, which should have been done when we first moved in seven years ago.  We also got rid of most of the books we've accumulated over the years, selling them to Half Price Books.  It was sad getting rid of our book collection because books mean a lot to both of us but our frame of mind right now has us moving around a lot in the coming years and heaving boxes of books from house to house seems unnecessary.  We hope to be able to restart our book collection someday, though.

We've got a long list of things we need to do to the house by the end of May in order for this place to rent quickly.  We've got seven years of renovations to complete in one month and if the past tells us anything it's that we're not motivated people.  But, the promise of living a few months on a Caribbean island seems to be giving us the push that nothing else has for quite some time.