Sunday, December 3, 2023: Ta Da! List
Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
Daily Diary, Day 1188:
As I wrote in my post last Sunday, I am switching things up and replacing the Weekly Writing Intentions post I have done every week since I started this newsletter in April of 2022. Instead, I am going to concentrate on writing about a couple of things I am particularly excited to celebrate for each week. A Ta da! list rather than a To-do list. Sometimes this will include writing word counts, but not always.
Here are the two things that happened this past week that I want to celebrate today.
While I said that I was shifting away from routinely giving word counts (which to my mind seemed to be more about my excuses for not achieving the goal I set the week before), today I felt it was appropriate because I hit a couple of milestones. The first is that I finished NaNoWriMo stronger than I expected, having written over 20,000 words in 30 days. The second milestone is that the manuscript has reached 50,000 words, and this puts me two-thirds of the way through the 75,000 word goal I set for the first draft of this fifth and final book in my Caelestis series. Both reasons to celebrate.
The second reason to celebrate is that my husband and I finally made the arrangements to get our bathrooms remodeled this spring. This is something we have been putting off for several years as we tackled other house projects.
To provide some context, our house was built as part of a pretty standard middle-class neighborhood in the early 1970s, with about four main models, some smaller one story houses, others slightly larger two story houses. Ours was one of the four bed-room, two-story houses, only about 1200 square feet, a little larger if you counted the garage which had been converted into a sort of all-purpose and laundry room. Thirty years ago we bought the house from the original owner, and it appeared they had done a few things to spruce it up, like new interior paint, new carpeting. They had not replaced the roof, which immediately started to leak after we moved in, and we had to replace it immediately.
Pretty consistently since then, many of the houses in the neighborhood have undergone some remodeling, two story houses pushing out the back, one story houses building up. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this neighborhood, called University City is desirable because it is located near so many freeways, is directly south of UC: San Diego-where my husband had his career-and is also only about a 15 minute drive from the ocean.
With only one child, we never felt the need to go larger, although we did remove some really awful wall-paper, eventually removed the pop-corn ceiling, and when we discovered my husband was allergic to dust, pulled up the carpet and replaced with engineered hard wood. We also had solar panels installed, and had a basic kitchen remodel, because I was constantly injuring myself on the sharp and fraying cabinet doors! Otherwise, we were pretty busy working and didn’t feel the need to spend money on upgrades (and frankly I thought we might downsize on retirement.)
However, five or six years ago, we made the decision that we were going to try to age in place. One of the key aspects of the house is its views, particularly out the back where we can see into a canyon, and the great sunlight we get pretty much all day. We have no desire to move out of San Diego as we age, which is the only way that the money for selling the home would make sense if we were going to turn around and buy, say a condo.
However, having made that decision, we knew that we had to start doing some of the maintenance we had put off for years. The first project was thrust upon us when our hot water tank sprang a leak, flooding the laundry room. In the spirit of doing projects that would last and help keep down expenses over time, we completely remodeled that room, taking out the old grungy carpet and putting in sturdy nice looking vinyl planks, insulating a wall that hadn’t been insulated by the former owners when they converted the garage, getting nice cupboards put in for storage. We also replaced the water heater with a tankless water heater (which we dearly love and which has saved us a good deal of money in our gas bill a real boon this past year when inflation hit gas prices in San Diego particularly hard.)
Then the next project became the roof, which was now thirty years old, and painting the exterior, which was at least twenty years old. The house was looking pretty shabby on the outside, and we went for high grade replacements that were “energy” saving in terms of material and color, and gave as a very long warranty that will last out life-time.
That was about the time I started talking about the need to remodel the bathrooms as our next project. Except for some new linoleum I put in about twenty years ago, our two full baths on the second floor or the half-bath on the first were pretty much untouched since we bought the house. And, I suspect things like the mirrors and counter tops and sinks hadn’t changed since the house was built fifty years ago.
However, just as we scheduled the company who had done our kitchen remodel and the laundry room to come in and give us an estimate, our old furnace broke down, and we knew that replacing it was going to have to be pushed to the front of the line. We had been talking about getting a heat pump, both as an energy-saving method of heating, but also because we’d just gone through about three summers where it really got really hot, so getting a heat pump that would also act as an air conditioner made sense. This, in turn would require us to upgrade the solar panels we had put in about twelve years ago. All of this made great sense, and we have really been happy with the heat pump, but it pretty much wiped out the funds I had been seeing as going to the bathroom remodel.
Then, with the uncertainty in the economy this past year, we decided to tackle a less expensive project first, our yard. The back yard had really suffered from 3 years of drought that killed the grass, and then last winter the unexpectedly heavy rainfall caused the front yard to become knee high with weeds. Because I was becoming ashamed that I was getting such enjoyment out of other people’s yards, when ours was such a disaster, we decided to tackle landscaping next. However, we wanted landscaping that wouldn’t require a good deal of maintenance and still survive the extremes of drought and heavy rainfall that now seemed to becoming normal for San Diego. Turns out that kind of landscaping isn’t cheap, and bathrooms got pushed down the road again.
But as I watched friends and family face a number of health issues in the past few years, and as I faced my only uncertainty this fall about my own health, I decided that it didn’t make sense to keep postponing the remodel that would have the largest positive impact on us as we aged, no matter what the cost.
So, even though the cost is going to be considerably more and will take considerably longer to complete than all of our other projects, this week we met with the designer from a company that specializes in bathroom remodels, liked what her plans were for the remodel, and signed a contract.
If all goes well, they will start at the end of February on the bathroom with the shower I use, then when that is done, move on to the other bathroom and the downstairs powder room at the same time. The whole thing is supposed to take 10 weeks, so I am assuming they will be done by mid-May.
Lots of disruption, but a big decision that I do believe will eventually bring me a lot of pleasure and definitely worth celebrating with a Ta da!
Ok, this ended up being longer than I expected, so I am going to keep the third thing I wanted to celebrate for next week’s post. But just a hint. I’ve decided on the female occupation that I am going to write about in my next full-length Victorian San Francisco mystery novel. And that certainly is something to celebrate.
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congrats on the manuscript... and I love the ta da!