Coming Back to Work
Its a little over 3 weeks since my surgery and I’m making my way back to work. I still can’t lift anything, reach down for anything and pick up anything off the floor without squatting. And if you know anything about squatting at age 50, well, you get my drift. I started back to work in little bits last week, for a few hours each day. Friday I taught a private lesson, left starving, ate a huge lunch then slept for 2 hours. Maybe I was being a little ambitious about the state of my recovery.
I plan to slowly work my way into working this week too. I have to save up all my energy on Tuesday so I can teach our After School advanced kiddos with Chelsea. But this week I also plan to work on my book. I have editing I want to do and final testing of the book so I can get this baby published. I’ve only been working on it for 6 years. Its about time I finish it. And next Sunday we have a big fund raising sale of vintage and costumes, but more on that later this week.
The roof has only a few finishing touches to do, then we can begin remediation. I sure hope they can get started on that sooner rather than later. There are a number of things we want to do on the inside before we get the contractors back in to put things back together.
The quote we received for the interior/exterior was a lot, like $165,000, a lot. That is more than our first house cost. We are definitely going to scale back some of the work they are doing, to try to get it down to maybe $100,000. I seriously don’t see that much work to do, but what do I know. We are working with the city of Lealman and are going to try to take advantage of their grant program for community redevelopment. They will pay up to $50,000 for the building work, but we have to pay a matching amount, so for $100,000, we will only be responsible for $50,000.
We will surely take the flooring install from them, plus a few other little things. Who wants to come install flooring with us for free beer (wine) and pizza in December?
The parking lot repaving will be a whopping $54,000 too, but Lealman will cover $25,000 of that too. We just need to get secondary quotes submitted to the city so they can select and approve the work.
But, the remediation has to happen next. That bill is about $27,000. David is a bit stressed out about the money we are spending (or rather the money we are borrowing to do this). I told him it will all work out and we just have to trust the process. So to sum up the bills so far:
Roof: $80,000
Remediation: $27,000
Remodel/Repairs: $165,000
Parking Lot: $54,000
We still have to factor in the architect cost, landscaping and the new furniture in our new space. The cost of all the work that needs to be done is practically what we paid for our second house.
Now to the new fun stuff. The last video series I did for Mama Needs a New Roof, raised us $5100 in memberships towards some of these expenses. How one of our loans works is that 20% of all sales at Sew Pinellas pays down the balance, so the more we have, the faster we pay it down, and the sooner we can take out another one to pay for more of the moving expenses. We also earned $28 on Instagram from the video series, so yay for little victories.
I’ll be introducing my new series, which will run longer, basically until we move. It won’t be daily as that would just annoy everyone. My new video/blog series will be called “Sew Mama Needs to Move” and instead of listing the days into it, it will be in the form of episodes. I also learned something about the new IG algorithm. They won’t share videos longer than 3 minutes to non-followers, but if you share a longer video, it messes with their algorithm and they begin to share it and I earn a little extra $$ towards this whole move, so if you see a video by me, reshare it. Its takes 2 seconds to hit the reshare button and costs you nothing. Plus it will be genuine content instead of all the stupid AI content that is being shown in our feed. Stay tuned for the first episode dropping today.