But sometimes I wish we were in a financial position to just jump on the 'work from home - be your own boss' bandwagon. It'd be great to set your own hours, work with clients and still get paid. But the hard part is finding clients.
Anybody need a new logo for their business? New website? Seriously. Contact my husband. Or me. I'm good with those too.
Dreams.
We are regular people, living in a regular tax paying world. Our house, it's beautiful, it's big, it's old. I love it. It's brick (good for keeping it cool in the summer and warm in the winter), and it's in a great neighborhood. But the city we live in keeps increasing our taxes, but our income has not increased since we moved into this house 10 years ago - if anything our income has gone down. The jobs for two graphic design professionals just aren't here - or they are, but they are already taken (not by us).
Despite the fact I have never had a full-time graphic design position, I do okay with the part time job that I have and with side graphic design jobs. If you have been to the Market On Main (if you live locally) and see the Apple A Day clothing boutique sign - yup, I did that. I'm proud of my artwork and designs, and I love what I do, I just wish I could do more of it.
Country Living.
Hubby recently did the math on moving out to the country - and he says it wouldn't be that much per year in vehicle maintenance, and even tire replacement (darn gravel roads). We know where we would move and why and there are benefits and the negatives as well. The benefits being: my kids would be outside A LOT, my kids would be close to what we refer to as the farm (aka Grandma's house), and life would maybe move a little slower - or at least be quieter - not living in town has that effect on people, building our own house for the purpose of having everything (including the laundry) on one level. The negatives being: living so far out (almost 10 - 15 min.), this would be an adjustment for me because I haven't lived in the country since I was like 4 years old! So just dropping everything and running to Target would no longer be an option. Building our own house (are we crazy?), because we have very little income right now, we don't have money to dump into all the things that are needed to build our own house, the way we want it.
I'm not afraid of work, I grew up working for my parents on their rental properties or on their own houses - of course most of the time they paid me pretty well (despite the fact that I wasn't the best worker), but I was by far their prettiest! I don't think my husband will pay me $8/hour for painting, though. :(
Building a house is not only a dream, in the next 10 years it will become a necessity - due to the fact that I have 65+ year old knees (I was told this by a doctor when I hadn't even reached 30 years old!) , and since baby girl is 2 months old, and the pregnancy stretching of the joints and extra fluid have 'worn off' I have noticed a whole lot of extra pain when I try to go up and down steps (mostly up). The hard part is going to be selling our house, which involves: ripping up some 1980s carpeting, refinishing floors, finding area rugs, getting rid of stuff (yikes!), teaching children how to put stuff away and painting/ touching up rooms.
Hubby wants to build basically a pole barn, but make it look like a house. The good thing with this is that they are cheaper to build, and they don't need support walls in the middle, so we don't have to have them, if we don't really need walls. Open floor plan, that's what I'm talking about! Hubby wants to design it himself - and as a former architecture major, I'm inclined to let him. Of course I'll have input, but hopefully we know what we like at this point in our lives.
Something like this, but not necessarily exactly like this:
Here's to dreaming big and making a new home!
