Our House Journey

So, we spent our first night in the camper last night.  It wasn’t a very restful night.  After working on moving most of the rest of the stuff out of the house all day, I was exhausted and should have slept well, but that was not to be.  We have a 6 month old puppy and he still isn’t **quite** potty trained.  At the house, we had a play pen that he would go in at night so he wasn’t wandering the house making me wonder if he had peed somewhere.  I thought it was too big for the camper, but after last night, I’m thinking I won’t survive another night without it!  Every time he moved (and when he moved, the entire camper would move), I’d sit straight up and check on him.  One time, I heard squeaking and thought for sure it was a mouse, but it was the dog chewing on our daughter’s shoe.  Ugh.

Back to the house to clean today..  My favorite thing…  NOT

At least the kids slept. And the cat looks happy

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog about our house journey for a while now.  I’ll try to be as condensed as possible in this first post to summarize the past 6 months, but we’ll see how it goes.

In January, 2012, we were not thinking of moving.  We had a great little Princess Anne on a large lot in town, we had finished renovating it years ago and had no intention of leaving anytime soon.  Then, I got on a real estate web site just to “browse” and set our whole world topsy turvy.

On that day, I found an old Victorian farm house on a few acres not far from town.  We had always dreamed of living in the country and are old house addicts, so we went and looked at the property.  Long story short, we made an offer on the house, but another couple had offered more so we didn’t get that house.  It did, however, put the idea in our heads that we not only were ok with moving at that time, but that we were actually going to try to make it happen.

Shortly after losing that house, my husband and I were driving around the country looking for the next potential property.  We drove by a house and my husband said, in passing, “that one would work”.  Then, seconds later, he exclaimed “Wait, I think it’s vacant, turn around!”.  So I did, and it was vacant!  We did a property search to find the owner and it turns out she grew up in the same town as some of my family and my Uncle was her soccer coach!  This had to be fate!

The house was in pre-foreclosure and was slated to be auctioned in June.  The owner, however, agreed to a short sale.  I saw posted on a website somewhere that the short sale world is called the “wild west of short sales”.  Whew, is that ever an understatement.

The details of what we have gone through since then are boring and exhausting, but the condensed version is that we are still fighting to clear the title on the house so we can negotiate the short sale.  The auction is now postponed to August, so we have some time, but in the mean time, we have sold our house in town.  In fact, we close on that house tomorrow afternoon.  Tomorrow at 2pm, we are effectively “homeless”.  Ok, that’s a bit dramatic I know, but it’s basically the truth.  Thankfully, we have a large 5th wheel trailer that we are going to be living in.  Thankfully, we also have our own business with a shop that we can park said trailer at for a while until we get things worked out.

When I found that house in January and started this process rolling, I had no idea that we would be living in the camper with two adults, two kids, three dogs, and a cat in July.

I’m choosing to look at this as an adventure.  We’ll see how long I keep that attitude!