Saying Goodbye After Twenty Years

During the summer of 1997, we started building our home. The plan was to live there for 4-5 years, then sell it.

But we fell in love with the area. And the people. Five years passes. Then ten, then fifteen. We entertained the idea of moving closer to my husband’s employment so he wouldn’t have such a long commute. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave.

A couple years ago, I knew it was time to start looking for a new home with main floor living. I’ve had bad knees all my life, and the stairs were really starting to bother me. Our four teenage boys could barely fit around the kitchen table. And I felt like our youngest daughter needed a room to play in that was near the main living area. So I started looking. I found a few that I thought would work, but my husband wasn’t sold.

Last year I really got serious. I started checking MLS on a daily basis, scouring all the listings for the perfect house. This went on for months. Finally we decided that we would need to build. I found a floorplan that I was in LOVE with. I went to the model home almost a dozen times. I had that house all planned out and decorated in my mind!

(photo taken from Arive Homes)

We even picked out a lot a few blocks from our house. It was in a section that hadn’t been started yet, but we are good friends with the builder, and he said he’d let us know as soon as they started that phase.

Then one night my husband came home and told me that one of our neighbors informed him that they were planning on moving. We knew their house might be a good fit for us. We came over the next day to look at it. It wasn’t perfect, but there were a lot of things we both loved about it.

We told them we were interested. They got it appraised, then within a few weeks we made an offer, but didn’t draw up a contract yet.

We started finishing up the dozen or so 80% complete projects we had around our house so that we could list it. It was a crazy few weeks. The night before we were going to list our house, I started having doubts. What if we weren’t supposed to buy the house? It had all happened so fast. I prayed that if it was meant to be, that our house would sell in a timely manner. . .

Within three days, we had three offers.

You can’t get a better answer than that!  I was so very grateful, and still am. God has really been watching out for us during this whole process, and I needed that.

We proceeded to draw up a contract with our neighbors, and since we didn’t need a realtor, we both saved a bunch of “dollar monies” as my 6 year old calls them.

So after almost twenty years, we are now in a new home. We had a lot of memories in that old house. We brought home four of our five babies there.  We spent countless birthdays, holidays, and happy days there. Hundreds of games of catch, soccer, basketball, and football were played in the yard. We finished a basement, built a deck, finished a yard, and upgraded almost every room. We cried tears of sadness, and tears of joy in that house. I will always love it.

But we have turned it over to a cute family that we already love. Of the three offers we received, one of them was from a family who already has ties to the area. We knew her when she was a teenager, and we are friends with her parents and siblings. I knew the house was meant to be theirs. And it was so much easier turning my “baby” over to someone I already knew. 🙂

So our new adventure has started. I’ll be sharing the updates we are making to this new house if we can ever get settled in. (Holey moley moving is sooooo much more work than I anticipated!)

And I will also be sharing the projects from my old house that I never got around to posting. Because nothing motivates you to finish things up like moving, am I right?

I’m looking forward to sharing this new chapter of our lives with you!