Building A Dream: The Joyous, Twisty Journey to Breaking Ground on a Beach House

By Anita Wasko

Finding Inspiring Lessons in a Beach House Dream

Anita was getting ready to retire, and she and her husband Chris wanted to break ground for a house in a Florida beach town. With their children grown, their idyllic dream was to move from scenic P

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Coast Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798988108313

Anita Wasko

Anita Wasko is a Mexican American born and raised in Pennsylvania. Her adopted city and state are Flagler Beach, Florida. Anita loves mentoring, meditation, writing, dancing, and being with friends and family. Building A Dream is her first book on pursuing one's dreams. Anita and her husband have two adult children. For more on Anita's journey, visit www.anitawasko.com.

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Copyright © 2023 by Anita Wasko

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including scanning, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, www.anitawasko.com/contact

The material in this book is intended only to offer information of a general nature. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the advice can be given or liabilities taken. The intent of the author is only to offer information based on the author’s own experiences to help in a reader’s personal journey and to entertain. In the event a person uses any of the information in this book, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for the person’s actions. Some names have been changed. Accounts of events are given based on the author’s recollection.

Published by Atlantic Coast Books, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Cover Design: Lynn Andreozzi

Cover Photograph: Lori Vetter Photography

Interior Design: Kayci Wyatt

Author Photograph: Kat Squibb

First edition 2023

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906687

ISBN: 979-8-9881083-0-6 (print)

ISBN: 979-8-9881083-1-3 (ebook)

To my husband, Chris.

Contents

Introduction

What Do I Want to Do When I Grow Up?

Why I Decided to Write This Book

Organization

Why Sage Advice?

Part 1: Letting Go

1: Early Years

My Grandparents’ Courtyard-Style Homes

Bossy Heart

When We Get Married

Monarchs on the Mountains of Mexico

Sage Advice: Trust That Life Will Lift You Up

2: Florida and COVID

Buying the Lot

Flagler Beach

Why Florida?

An Imagined Walk-through of Our Dream House

The Evolving House Plan, 2013–2019

The Evolving House Plan, 2019–2020

March 2020: COVID-19 Hits Work Life

Sage Advice: Consider Your Dreams

3: August 2020

Revised House Plans

Postponing the Flagler Beach Trip

Sneak Peek at the House Plans

Sage Advice: Be Grateful

4: September 2020

My Career and Life

Meditation

The Bedroom Window

Girls’ Beach Trip

Life Sometimes Asks Us to Believe

Retirement Call

Showing Dad the House Plans

Overcoming Guilt

Sage Advice: Breathe

5: October 2020

Time Out

Awaiting the House Estimate

Throat Chakra and the Renaissance Faire

Estimate Revealed

Pick Up the Phone and Call

1010 Sign

Sage Advice: Stay Open to Options

6: November 2020

Confused

Handle as Two Separate Situations

Aunt Angela and My Mom

Talking to Human Resources

House Draw

Telling the Boss

Monarch Butterflies Show Up

The Waffle

Telling Coworkers and Staff

Signs

Budget Adjustment

The Work Beast

The Big Bag of Ice

Thanksgiving

Sage Advice: Let Your Internal Compass Guide You

7: December 2020

Emptying the Office

The Cost Estimate Is In

Giving Office Stuff Away

Countdown to Christmas

Christmas Day

Sage Advice: Try Stillness

8: January 2021: The Last Week

New Year’s Day

People are Thinking of Retirement

I Choked Up

Virtual Retirement Party

Last Day of Work

My Father-in-Law

Sage Advice: Take a Leap of Faith

Part 2: Creating

9: January 2021

What Did You Do for A Job?

First Monday of No Work

House Pricing: Verbal Bid

House Pricing in Writing

House Contract Received

House Plans

Ten Things to Be Grateful For

Pool Design

Sage Advice: Let Go and Allow Life In

10: February 2021

Retirement Dinner with the Kids

House Contract Signed

Time and Reggie

Revised House Plans

Pool Estimates

Love

COVID Cases in PA Falling

High School Notes

Sage Advice: Empty the Trash

11: March 2021

The Pool Contract

House Down Payment in the Mail

The Schedule and Creating

Sage Advice: Lean on Wisdom Over Fear

12: April 2021

Reggie’s Prognosis

Pulling Permits

Chris’s Job

The Service Station

Float Therapy

Walking Reggie

Severance Agreement

Sage Advice: Give In to Feeling Good, Give Up Feeling Right

13: May 2021

Chris’s First Days Home

Site Plans

Site Plan Results

My EOS

Repair Estimate

Choice of Volkswagens

Permit Submitted

New Jetta, New Desk

Sage Advice: Let Go of Second-Guessing Yourself

14: June 2021

Reggie and SpaghettiOs

After Reggie

Reggie’s Gift

Pending Permit Application Approval

Zoning the Driveway

Sage Advice: Fill Your Own Well First

15: July/August 2021, Groundbreaking

Survey Resubmitted for Permit

Excavation of the Property

Heading to Flagler Beach

In Flagler Beach

Back Home

Sage Advice: I Don’t Need to Know

16: Creation

Creativity Builds This House

Creative Expansion

Sage Advice: Stay Tuned In

Sage Advice Summary and Bonus

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

What Do I Want to Do When I Grow Up?

It was the 1970s. St. Peter’s Catholic grade school stood in an old steel town in Pennsylvania, appropriately named Steelton. The school was small, a classroom held two grades. Both lay teachers and nuns led classes.

The children attended a half-hour Mass every morning with a Slovenian congregation at St. Peter’s Church, which stood proudly next to the school. The students were friends with the kids up the road who attended St. Mary’s Catholic grade school, with its church next to it, this one serving a Croatian congregation. Somehow, families and children knew each other in Steelton and the surrounding communities. This was a small but comfortable world.

I attended St. Peter’s school in uniform, a blue and white plaid jumper and white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. I was Anita Navarro, a first-generation American girl born to Mexican parents, with dark brown eyes and wavy brown hair half swept up by my mother and secured by those elastic ties with the balls on the end. No matter our backgrounds, we were students who were a part of a Slovenian church.

Mornings, all the kids were quietly ushered into our assigned pews in the front of the church for Mass and were taught to sing the congregation’s Slovenian liturgical songs. I marveled that I was learning to sing in Slovenian, in addition to knowing Spanish and English. Immersed in this community, I learned to dance the polka, rather than learning a traditional Mexican dance.

In class or Mass, I can’t recall where, we were asked to consider whether we were being called to be either priests or nuns. I was a good girl, so I silently considered what they asked. The nun idea did not appeal to me; being a priest sounded much more appealing. The priest ran the whole operation, he was in charge. But girls couldn’t become priests. And, even if girls could become priests, they could not marry. And I knew I wanted to have my own baby. I already had that maternal pull, even as a little girl, as witnessed by the love I showered on my favorite baby doll.

So, the priesthood and becoming a nun were out. Not happening. Perhaps I might have considered being a priest if they could be girls and were allowed to marry, but I was glad I didn’t have to consider the idea of a religious life for very long.

I considered my other job options. And, being a kid, I didn’t know of many. Being an actress sounded exciting and glamorous to me. But there was also something else innate: I wanted to grow up and be a boss, just like my dad.

I admired that my dad ran his own business as a builder who specialized in custom homes. But though I was a contractor’s daughter who knew about hammers and Phillips screwdrivers, I had no inherent skills to build a home from scratch. If only I’d had those skills I could have grown up, helped my dad, and perhaps taken over the business one day.

I can recall being lobbied about my future job potential at an even younger age. I must have been five years old, or younger, because it happened when I lived in Bressler.

Bressler lies on a hill above the town of Steelton. My house, with its small backyard, was home to a metal swing set, a walnut tree, and a cherry tree; the house stood among a row of white townhouses.

Back in Bressler, my parents were friends with the neighbors. A neighbor who witnessed me speaking Spanish and then English told me I should consider being a translator. I’m sure I didn’t respond, that was the last thing I wanted.

But it wasn’t the last time I would hear that suggestion from an adult. I knew knowing how to speak two languages was special; probably because I heard that from the same adults. I knew one thing, though: I was already busy with the bumpy work of translating and switching back and forth between Spanish and English.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mexican heritage. And my mom made it easier by asking that we speak English with her, so she could learn the language. My dad was already fluent. Still, the reality was that I straddled the two languages as part of my daily life. I didn’t want to translate on top of that for a living. Plus, I felt I wasn’t all that great a translator.

In the early 1980s, I attended Catholic high school in the capital city of Harrisburg, adjacent to Steelton. The high school was a neo-Gothic building flanked by two imposing towers. I no longer wore a uniform, but instead wore dress clothes. Amid all these changes there was one constant: I was still figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Looking back at it now, I never made the connection that there was an internal drive directing me toward running operations. Instead, that path slowly evolved on its own, without my realizing it. I wasn’t ready to run my own business as my dad had; somewhere inside I wanted the safety of working for a business. Up to this point, I had followed my heart. I was in a few clubs, including the drama club. My favorite activity was serving as a peer counselor at the high school. I loved it so much that I couldn’t stop talking about it well into college, and of course here.

I was paired with another peer counselor to lead sessions with a group of students in a circular room in one of the school’s towers. It was cozy, relaxed, and fun, and now makes me think of a room you might see in a Harry Potter movie. There was something special about that time for me, co-leading a session with our peers.

It’s hard for me to reach back to that high-school version of myself and understand what I was feeling and sensing in those sessions. It’s almost as though my teenage self is reminding me, no adults allowed! The content of those sessions, the talks, the sharing, were left behind in the towers of the now-vacated high school.

But it was the first formal situation in which I experienced mentoring others. And when I mentored, I received as much as I gave, which is why mentoring had always been such a rewarding experience for me. Shifts happened, awareness opened, peers helped each other, and that was cool.

Academically, I survived math and science and still made it into the National Honor Society. A nun who served as a career counselor at the high school helped me look at my strengths. She examined my results from a career questionnaire and suggested I major in Communications.

This moment with the nun was pivotal. No one in my family had been to college before me. My parents anticipated my attending college, and I had their attentive ears as I devoured a guidebook I bought about colleges and majors. But guidance on selecting the right major for me would come from the nun. Communications: the sound of it resonated. Well, mostly. I had really enjoyed peer counseling and thought this would draw on the same skills.

One day, I asked my dad if he thought I should study psychology instead of communications. He responded with a simple question: Do you really want to hear people’s problems all day long? I only took a beat. I guess not. So, I majored in Communications with Marketing as a minor.

While in high school, I volunteered in the school office. One day, a suited recruiter was there to interview a student. I asked him who he represented. King’s College, he said, and he handed me an exquisite midnight blue packet about the college to take home with me. I visited several colleges with my parents in Pennsylvania. But only King’s College, which I had learned about by sheer coincidence, felt familiar, like home.

The college was just far away enough from home, but not too far, nestled in town, which reminded me of the town feel I’d had growing up in Steelton and Bressler. And the people I met there were friendly. The college wasn’t too small, but still small enough to have a sense of community. I had only looked at Catholic colleges. This one seemed to be the best fit for me and it offered a good education.

Looking back, I wondered why I associated a Catholic education with a good education, and I realized it came from my dad. Working hard for every dollar he got, he chose to use those dollars to pay for our education in the Catholic school system.

When I was looking at colleges, I brought the King’s tuition costs to my dad and asked him if he could afford it. He said he could. In my junior year, when I became managing editor of the college newspaper, I received a scholarship that covered partial tuition and, when I became the editor-in-chief in my senior year, a full scholarship. I felt better contributing to my educational costs in this way.

In my senior year, my dad bought me a fully loaded (except for air conditioning) used Mazda 626 (that I loved), so I could drive the newspaper back and forth from the printer, in the next town over, to the college.

But we didn’t know then that any of these things would happen. I had only worked summers, which just covered my own spending. I secured student loans, but to this day I still don’t know how my dad financially did it all, but he did, and for that I was grateful.

King’s is in Wilkes-Barre, a city two hours north by car from my childhood home, with industrial roots in coal mining. Mining had created its prosperity, but the city’s economy declined with the industry’s collapse.

Still, in the mid-to-late 1980s, a walk downtown surprised one with a playful fountain in its central plaza. This was a city in recovery from the decline of the coal mining boom days and the devastating Hurricane Agnes flood of 1972.

There was a mix of old buildings around the plaza, some abandoned. It was a place that promised things to do: shops, restaurants, a hotel dance club, a closed—then reopened—Art Deco theater for the performing arts, access to a bank with an ATM, and a Boscov’s department store. King’s, with its compact campus, was an easy walk from downtown.

When I arrived at King’s in 1984, I became a Monarch, the nickname given to the student body and sports teams. After making new friends, and telling each other what our majors were, I was lightly teased for my fluff major. I knew differently, though. I could already tell communications would require hands-on experience and a drive to succeed, and that was what I planned to do.

I had a lot of fun in college and I met many new people, including Chris Wasko, a guy from a small town called Sadsburyville in Chester County, not too far from the City of Philadelphia. Chris was majoring in economics, finance, and accounting.

Over the holiday break, I wrote a letter to a new girlfriend from college who lived in Abington, also not far from Philadelphia. In part, I wrote, I’ve been enjoying my break away from the books and going out with my friends. Chris Wasko has been down to my house. I really like him a lot.

In 1988, I graduated from King’s College with honors. As the high school counselor had suggested, I now had my degree in hand, a Communications major and Marketing minor. And, before I left, I had also managed to take in a psychology class.

Why I Decided to Write This Book

Did you ever imagine doing something when you were a little kid? And what you imagined got left behind in childhood? I imagined writing a book.

I suppose that imagination fueled what I did in my college life: writing for and running the college newspaper as the editor-in-chief. But my career, rather than veering into writing, slowly and steadily moved into operations, until I became the director of motor vehicles for driver and vehicle services (which most people recognize as the DMV in their own home state) at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. I apparently was meant to make my living this way. And the kicker is, it only recently occurred to me that running the college newspaper was my first foray into running an operation.

Then one day, in the summer of 2020, I saw an online writing challenge pop up. And, for some reason, I decided to try it out. Word by word, sentence by sentence, my childhood dream of writing was returning to me. And I loved it. I began to journal everything, every day.

At the same time, a major transition was coming to my life. And I felt this time of transition was what I needed to share in a book. I didn’t know how the story was going to end, I simply wrote every day, willing the universe to meet me halfway.

At this point I had been overseeing the motor vehicles operation for a solid thirteen years. I was seasoned. And I gave the job my all. I knew there were other people out there like me, people who gave a lifetime of hard work, energy, stamina, and heart to the job. And let’s not overlook handling stress, lots of stress.

I didn’t want to write a book about retirement, there are a lot of books out there on that. I wanted to write about the idea of transition and transformation. What did one go through when they decided to move over to the other side of a long-time career? I was about to find out.

But there was more than that. My husband Chris Wasko and I had a long-held dream of leaving Pennsylvania and moving to the beach after we retired and living in our dream beach house, a Mediterranean/Spanish-style house with a courtyard, influenced by all my visits to Mexico with my parents and Chris.

Before I had put pen to paper, we had already