The old cliche, "one picture tells a thousands words" is so very true in this picture.
Here is the last picture of us standing in front of our old Victorian home. The next day, it will belong to a new owner as we sold it after nearly 5 years of our experiment in utilitarian living. We will have most of our possessions inside the Chevy Spark and hitting the road to parts unknown
Does it surprise you that we sold our home after putting in so much work, effort and beauty into it?
No, nobody is dying, or getting separated or getting foreclosed on. We sold because of several reasons unrelated to the house or the neighborhood or Oakland in general. In fact, our area has seen real change and improvement on several fronts, as this blog has chronicled. So much change has happened that we just felt now was the right time to get Andrea out of her terrible, dead-end career job and for me to look for new, fertile ground to experiment and grow as an artist and storyteller.
We loved our Victorian and it gave us years of safety, comfort and pleasure. Being inside it felt like an oasis away from all the technifying culture, heavy traffic and general population craziness. We learned a wide range of skills including gardening and general carpentry. We learned how to make use of a wide variety of recycled materials and discovered that we have the capabilities and taste to make an old, broken down house into a beautiful home.
I do think that if we were 15 years younger, we would have felt we were in the center of the universe and would never have sold. Nearly all the new blood in the neighborhood were refugees from SF or some other state, bringing their own generational energy and vibe and perhaps we felt just a little "out of place" because of this. We will miss our wonderful neighbors who looked out for us and helped teach us what it meant to be 'a good neighbor'. Mostly we will miss the beautiful kids playing next door and the beautiful weather we enjoyed virtually every day of the year.
I could write a lengthy post but I would rather sit with you, gentle reader, to explain all the reasons why we sold, left jobs, uprooted our life to essentially become wandering gypsies for a year or longer. Perhaps you'll reach out to us and we'll come and visit you and just talk about why we felt the need to change our lives in such dramatic fashion? I suppose being truly connected to you, to the world and to our greater humanity is the real driving force behind our decision.
This is our final post on this blog. So we will leave you with the pics we used to market the home. These pics show exactly how we lived in our house and was never "staged". This was the place that comprised our lives for nearly 5 years and we felt we accomplished our goals to bring the house back to its original splendor while updating it for modern times. At the very bottom, is a little surprise for you, gentle reader.
Goodbye our dear, first home and HELLO WORLD!
Our surprise for you, dear reader, is that we have a BRAND NEW TRAVEL BLOG! Want to follow the new adventures of George and Andrea aka GANDA? Then click on this link.
