It was a crazy summer this year. If you would have told me in the spring that we’d be selling our home, buying land and building a new house – I would have said you were crazy. But there we were.
It was Father’s Day weekend when I got a tip from my older sister that she had found some land for sale on the other side of town. They would be putting an offer in on one of the parcels of land but there were still a few others left for sale. We did some soul searching, ultimately debating if this was something we really wanted to do and was it going to be realistic for us to up and sell our house while we built.
The Land
After visiting the piece of land several times in a day or two, we knew that is where we wanted to be. It was so refreshing to the soul just to be out in the country amongst the beauty of nature – and we just knew, it would be worth it.
So we put in an offer on the land – and we got it! We were pumped. TWENTY ACRES were going to be ours, oh the activities we could do with that.
After the excitement of having our offer accepted, we realized we were going to have our hands full in getting the house ready to sell. We had been in our current home for 10 years, and had accumulated A LOT of stuff. Namely baby stuff, kid stuff and somehow just a whoooole lot of hunting stuff (not pointing fingers here but…)
So we cleaned, and organized, and sold as much stuff as possible. It would be a marathon, not a sprint. Once we got organized we realized how much work we had to do before we listed the house. It had been a while since we did updates, or paint touchups, or just that deep cleaning of every single room in the house! It was a ton of work, and it made for some really late 3am mornings. But we were determined to make it the best it could be when we listed it!
Listing the House
Finally, it was time to list the house. We had purchased it in the housing slump of 2009/2010 and as a foreclosure we purchased it for $186,000. With the equity we had into it with updates and additions, we decided to list at $340,000. Knowing full well that I did not want to clean in between every showing after the girls lived in the house for 5 minutes, we decided to take a little staycation out to Alexandria to Arrowwood for the weekend. They managed to get in quite a few showings and we came back that weekend to multiple offers!!
We ended up selling for over list price and the buyer paid closing costs. It was kind of our best case scenario!
Then it was time to get the moving process started. But what were we going to do once we closed on our old home and our new home wasn’t even started yet? It was a stressful process that we didn’t quite figure out until about a week before we closed. We went out and purchased an RV (a 2017 Keystone Springdale travel trailer) that would give us everything we needed for the interim. We had planned to live on the land while we built so we could be there and be able to enjoy our new ‘home’ spot.
But then… we had the strange blizzard of October 2020 (which is so 2020-esque) and we didn’t have power at the land, or water, or anything really. So we bounced back and forth between my mom’s and my dad’s while we tried to figure out a temporary solution.
Moving Day
It was a stressful, STRESSFUL, and straining time. Lots of sleepless nights and worrying about what was going to be best for our family. I had been pulling for hiring a mover the whole time but Tyler said we could manage it ourselves. Then I talked to the people at Premium Moving Services and they said they could help us out and provide us their services for the love of our blog 🙂 They showed up on moving day and we had quite a bit of work ahead of us yet.
They got right to work and carried ALL our large furniture – couches, chairs, beds, dressers, cribs, you name it. It would have literally taken us all day if not a couple days to get this done and they did it in an HOUR. Efficiency at it’s finest. They even helped us organize our POD a little better so we could fit more into it and make the most use of our storage. That was HUGE for us, because that saved us not only on additional storage but the man power to do it. It is the best investment I would highly recommend. Such an amazing help on a very stressful day.
So a huge, ginormous shoutout to Premium Moving Services, they saved the day and I can’t imagine having had to do that all ourselves when they tackled it in such a short time in an incredibly professional way.
Now, we’ve got some items in our POD storage. Some items in a storage unit near our land, and some items with us currently in our RV as we prepare to go full-time RV living. We’ve decided to take it south for the winter and since we can’t really build this winter – no use sweating out the winter weather when we don’t technically have to 🙂
So as we plan our journeys, we’re excited for some new adventures and working on the finalizing the plans for the new house. The girls are so pumped to have their new rooms *someday*. We’re hoping time flies and can’t wait to finally have a ‘home’ again!
That is it for now! But I’ll keep you posted as the home process continues!
Hearts,
Sarah
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