Act III:The Resort

Today is June 30^th.  We moved the closing on the resort back to Aug. 15. There is so much to do, and every day I ask myself, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

And with that auspicious start, I’m going to give a very brief history of me (oh joy).

In college I majored in English Lit. Before my last year of college, I decided to take a summer semester in Mexico City. There, I met a few fellow students who introduced me to the world of adventure traveling—getting off the beaten path. And I was hooked.

I had worked my way through college as a carpenter and after college I kept at the carpenter thing in order to finance more trips south of the border.  After a couple years of this, I saved enough to buy a Volkswagen camper van and that December I pointed the VW south and away I went. After much time and many adventures, I was getting tired of traveling on a shoestring budget and decided when I got home I would start a contracting business to make enough money to “do the travel thing “right.” On the way home my camper van met an untimely end in a place called Yokum Texas.

Above, Padre Island on the way home. Below Yokum Texas

That’s what happens when you push an air-cool engine too hard on a 112 degree day. I made the local paper (probably because I kinda set the local Dairy Queen on fire). But, serendipity to the rescue! I had been trying to figure out how to come up with some money to start my contracting business and the insurance payoff on the van gave me a start. If that fire had started in Mexico I wouldn’t have gotten anything.

I made it home, started my business and was off and running, working hard and dreaming of buying a sailboat and sailing the Caribbean or having a business on an island no one had yet heard of called Isla Mujeres, or perhaps Cay Caulker in Belize (sound familiar?). But then the unthinkable happened. I met a girl.

And boy-howdy did I ever! It was July 5, 1985. In my heart, it was love at first sight, but it took my brain 2 years to catch up to my heart. Laurie and I got married in July 1988.

Laurie’s father (whom I never got to meet) was Hungarian.  He’d been in the Hungarian revolution and escaped to America. So, Laurie’s grandparents, aunt, and cousins all still lived in Hungary, and we spent most of our travel money and time going to visit her family and it was wonderful.

When our 3 children were born, we naturally wanted to take them to Hungary to meet family and experience that part of their heritage.  We took many “other” vacations, but the big budget traveling was always “across the pond.” I don’t regret any of it and I would do it all over again. Laurie’s Hungarian cousins are some of my favorite people in the world (and don’t even get me started on Hungarian cooking!).

As time passed, I went from being a carpenter/contractor (framing houses) to a home builder. I was a pretty good home builder but didn’t enjoy it. I’m what I call a “one trick pony.” I don’t multi-task well; in fact, I hate it. I want to do one thing and one thing only. I call it being focused; my wife calls it being obsessive. Being a home builder with multiple projects drove me batty and I went back to framing.

Around 2009 when the housing crisis developed, I started buying foreclosed houses. I bought a bunch. I couldn’t flip them because no one was buying except me and others like me. So, out of necessity I became a remodel carpenter and a landlord—the 2 lines of work I always disliked and avoided. The opportunity was just too good to pass up.

Twelve years later I still very-much disliked being a remodeler and landlord (and multi-tasker) and in November of 2020 I cracked. I came home from work and had a temper-tantrum. I’d had enough, and, let me tell you, it was a first-rate temper-tantrum.

During this temper-tantrum I said multiple times “I’m sick and tired of this, I’m sick and tired of that, and I’m done.” I think I was even stomping my foot. Anyway, my body said, okay, if you want to be sick and tired, let’s be sick and tired.  I got a bad case of COVID less than two weeks later.

Disease may be defined as: A change produced in living things in consequence of which they are no longer in harmony with their environment.

William Thomas Councilman

How I got from having COVID and being a COVID long-hauler to signing a sales contract to buy a scuba diving resort is told in the first 3 blog posts (and shame on you if you haven’t read them).

In order to pay for the resort, we have to sell a bunch of houses which is good because I want to unload the suckers anyway—and now I have a reason. But it’s bad because in order to sell them, we have to displace renters, clean and remodel them—again. In other words, in order to quit doing what I hate doing, I have to do a whole lot more of it in a concentrated amount of time.

Laurie and I knew when we agreed to buy the resort what we were up against. Buying a resort was totally unplanned and we knew it would take quite some time and work to get the houses sold. I initially thought that we had a few houses we could sell easily to other investors but that hasn’t happened. Every house has been a dogfight. To sell a house “as is” to an investor would mean leaving as much as twenty to thirty thousand or more on the table. Multiply that times ten and you get the picture. So, here we are, slogging through the process one house at a time, working 6-7 days a week, often sun-up to sun-down.

And, there’s a lot of work to be doing on the resort—remember, I’m a one trick pony. There are no guests on the calendar.  None, zero, nada. George hadn’t done any marketing in 3 years. His only guests have been a few return customers. So we are working on creating a marketing strategy, and one of the reasons I started this blog is part of that. I knew nothing about social media, and I mean nothing. This blog is getting me in the game, forcing me to learn. (I always said the reason I’m not on Facebook is because I’m afraid no one would be my friend). I’m enjoying writing the blog, but the tech stuff, not so much, and my family is getting tired of me yelling at the computer.

So we are slogging through. Intellectually I know there is an end but most days I can’t see it. All I see is dirty, disgusting bathrooms, broken…everything, clogged gutters, mangled mini-blinds—I could go on here for quite a while.

Every morning around 5:30 I ask myself, what have I gotten myself into. Every afternoon around 2:00 I tell myself, I just wanna quit. But I don’t. And in my saner moments I know we will get the houses sold and we can focus on the resort—the fun stuff.

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude (Jimmy Buffet)