Transitioning

As of this morning, Denny and I have been homeowners for ten days.  To say it's been hectic would certainly be a bit of an understatement.

There have been moments where you grin ruefully, (and this will be TMI for some folks) like when you finish using the toilet and reach out with your foot to hit the flush pedal.  Every darn time for three solid days.  Or when I transferred the food from our four door RV refrigerator to our side by side refrigerator in the house only to find I was out of room for the food I had.  The RV refrigerator is larger.  Same with our RV kitchen cabinets and pantry; what was comfortably stored in our rig now is split between the kitchen and the storage cupboard in the garage of the house.  Wow.  Now I have to admit I don't have everything stacked on top of each other in the cupboards of the house as I did in the RV, so there will have to be some reshuffling and rearranging now that we're getting settled in and that should help but it does tickle me to realize that more space isn't necessarily more storage.  As our RVing friends Don and Vicki, who have also moved into The Villages, are finding out as well.

We've pretty much emptied out The Beast.  A final cleaning and he'll be ready for when his new owners come down to look at him next month.  It is bittersweet to see The Beast empty of those things that made it ours, but I foresee a lot of new adventures for him down the road.

As you can see from the photo above, we're still awaiting furniture.  The leather couch is on loan from the furniture company until our living room furniture is built and delivered.  The house is a bit "echo-y" at the moment due to all the empty space around us, but within a few more weeks the place will look more like a home.  On a minimalist RVer style, of course, with few knick-knacks and gewgaws.

Certainly the transition is expensive.  All an RVer brings to a house is linens, kitchenware, tools and clothing.  The list of things one needs is huge, from furniture for several rooms to bedding for an extra bedroom to multiple trash cans--stuff RVers normally don't worry about because one of everything is more than sufficient.  The more big box stores Denny and I walk into, the more things we see that "we could use."  I'm already working on reining that in for a few months.

Soon the two of us will have to start looking for a car and a golf cart and already my tree hugging self is fighting with my logical self.  The tree hugger wants an ecologically correct electric cart while 80% of the people here have a gasoline powered cart due to the size of The Villages. I'm told that many electric golf carts can be found stranded daily on the cart paths which line the city while stranded gas powered carts are rare.  So I waffle, because at this stage of simply trying to pull the house together I have no clue how much running around I'll do in The Villages attending classes, playing golf (someday), shopping and just joy-riding.  Here in The Villages your golf cart is your primary vehicle and your car is your secondary vehicle.  It is indeed an unusual lifestyle.

That's a glimpse of why posting is still sparse.  This makes post 1993--seven more and I think the RV Vagabonds blog will end as such.  Perhaps the next blog can be Not RV Vagabonds?