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To be clear, this is not a travel blog. Do I write about travel, sure, but I prefer to focus on our own experiences & blunders along the way. Yes, occasionally I will throw in some fun facts & recommendations. If you head all the way back to the beginning, you can see why & how we started our adventures. If you head back just a couple of posts, you will get a glimpse into my “starting over.”
During Covid 🦠 I gave up my organizing business of 15+ years, partially to keep the old folks 👵 in my family safe but mostly because I was tired of dealing with other people’s crap. I say that tongue & cheek of course 😉 What I was really tired of was never feeling like clients & I “finished” a job. There was always one more 📦 box or shelf or closet, that we would get to next time. Next time never came. Clients unsure of themselves & their decision making skills & me unable to assure them or convince them to push past their overwhelm & fear of letting go. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s a lot! Believe me, being on the road for over 2.5 years has revealed my own disorganized tendencies & penchant for over packing because I can’t or won’t make a decision 🤷♀️
So I took a break. What I have discovered over these past 2.5 years is that I really miss it, not just organizing itself but helping other people who want to be organized. We live in other people’s houses 🏠 When I say that, others say, “oh, I could never!” or “isn’t that weird?” It definitely takes some getting used to & sometimes more flexibility than even we have 😬
We have done 13 pet sits since January of 2023. Our first was a beautiful beach front house in Mexico 🇲🇽 escaping a fraudulent AirBnB host. The rest have been in the US, mostly Colorado & Oregon. We have adopted this way of life for the moment, being homeless for all intents & purposes, living out of our truck. 75% of our sits have been everything we expected & perfectly adequate. 25% have been less clean & more cluttered than we would have liked 😣 It’s the chance we take.
I make no secret in our bio profile that I am a “retired” professional organizer. One homeowner said, “do whatever you want.” So I did & loved every minute of it! Another homeowner said, “do nothing.” So I only did a little. Oops, my own OCD could not be assuaged. Do they notice? Do they care? Does it make them happy? Does it irritate them? IDK… They all leave us rave reviews, most saying the house was cleaner than when they left, which is always our goal – leave it better than we found it 😊
The homeowners of one of our earlier sits, left us a lovely thank you note & a bottle of wine, so I cleaned out & reorganized their pantry. Overstepping without permission, ABSOLUTELY! Thankfully, they loved it & said so.
For me, organizing a physical space, helps me organize my mind. It’s like playing Tetris 🧱
What does all that have to do with starting over…? What began as a well thought out adventure, took a bit of a turn. There is nothing like finding out you have a deadly disease, have to regroup on all the plans & then sit on the couch for the next 6 months recovering to make one reevaluate life.
I want to create beautiful spaces for myself & others. Does that mean getting off the road? Probably, but that all depends on the housing market 😉 What we are not willing to do, is settle for less than what we want, because we don’t have to. We are still in love with Pagosa Springs & continue to believe that is where we will find a new home 🏡
In the mean time, I am trying to share more about what we are doing on the way to where we are going & I hope you are enjoying that as much as I am. I am also re-envisioning what a new organizing business looks like in the future… virtual organizing, vacation rentals & airbnb organizing or individual clients needing to downsize & declutter or some of this or all of this or none of this???
A couple of other things I have been working on are a newsletter & becoming an Amazon Associate. If you are reading this, you got here one of two ways… a social post or my NEW newsletter. My newsletter will be going out via email to ensure folks who actually want to read this drivel, don’t miss a post on social media 💻 The newsletter will also be an opportunity for me to share links to my favorite things I have found to make traveling & life easier via Amazon. We have generally had good luck 🍀 on the road as long as I remember to ask home owners not to stop 🛑 their mail & of course, change our “delivery address” online.
I get it, Amazon is the hundred pound gorilla, you either love them or hate them. I myself am a big fan, so much so I signed on to be an affiliate marketer with them. What does that mean? It means when you click on my links, here, in my newsletter or on social media & complete an order, purchasing items from Amazon, I get a few dollar & cents. You do not have to purchase the specific items I link to, only get to Amazon via my links & shop from there. Ideally 😉 you would bookmark my Favorite Things page here & always arrive to Amazon via my website.
A huge THANK YOU, to all of those who supported my launch on Prime Day in July. It was at least successful enough to keep it going & put in some effort.
As always, another thank you for hanging around & following along as we live this unconventional life. What comes next? Your guess is as good as mine, but I will do my best to keep you in the loop 😃 We are currently pet sitting in Colorado thru September. After that we head back into ballooning with a few CO rallies & eventually Albuquerque for Balloon Fiesta. Hopefully we will see many of your there or along the way… 🛻
Don’t miss a single opportunity to laugh at us or with us as we bumble through life on the road 🛻 This newsletter won’t overwhelm your inbox, nor will your info leave my contacts list 😊 Future newsletters will contain blog post updates, tips on organizing & how we are living rent free while making a little cash on the side with Amazon 🛒 I hope you will join my curious audience as we make our way forward ➡️ “Where’s the Bairs” Newsletter 😆