As you can imagine things have been a bit crazy around here. We have been working like crazy people trying to sell the rest of our belongings, as well as finishing up projects in the Airstream.
Here’s a look at our progress on the house, and what we still need to accomplish by FRIDAY! Ahhhh! I might be freaking out just a little.
We closed on the selling of our house last month and then promptly wrote out a rent check so we could stay and finish up some work projects and other commitments. Kind of strange to be renting our own house, but it worked out for the best so we can’t complain. Most importantly, we are mortgage free!! We all have mixed feelings about this: Cara is still insistent that we sell the Airstream and move the house to a campground; Rachel and Andrew will miss their friends and all the great memories we made. I will miss our garden and the flower beds I so painstakingly put together. Sam has had a great work space in the garage. We’ve definitely called this pile of brick & mortar our HOME. It will be missed. A lot.
At the same time, we look forward to new adventures. There are many reasons we made this decision, so I thought we could detail out the Top 10 Reasons Selling Our House and Almost Everything In It To Travel Full Time is Worth It. Ready? Here we go:
This is only advantageous if your are not a “nester”. Apparently we aren’t one house/one neighborhood kind of people. We like new and exciting places and don’t mind a continuous string of new experiences. My brother, on the other hand, loves to come home to his bed, his house, his normal life after a vacation. Totally fine, just not our style.
Once again, this definitely can have its up and downs. Generally its pretty up though. In the few short weeks we’ve been at the “Lehi house” (as my kids have dubbed it) I rarely see Sam. We get to the end of the day, and I feel like we haven’t spoken or seen each other at all. My kids are always off playing with friends and we just have less family time. It makes me sad as we’ve grown accustomed to being in each other’s space and we LIKE it. Crazy, right?
We couldn’t afford the real estate to give us this kind of acreage. Our backyard is ever changing, ever exciting. Mountains, beaches, desert, trees! We get to have it all, right outside our door. Yes, our house is small, but we try not to spend too much time in it anyway.
I can’t even begin to imagine the types of things our kids are learning without even realizing it. I imagine that years into the future we will still be reaping the benefits of their on the road education. Real life experiences in historical places, plant identification, geography, and just learning about our amazing country in general.
I have always been a tent camper. Growing up, we’d love to go spend time in the “great outdoors”. I still love it. Yes, its a little dirty, there’s generally some bugs, but how beautiful! We get to explore, admire, and travel in this beautiful land that our Heavenly Father created for us.
These have certain bragging rights. I love watching my kid’s hats fill up with shiny gold badges. Its so fun to see others’ responses when they wear them around the National Parks we visit. A lot of them take work (some are easy) and I’m super proud of my kids for working so hard to earn them.
We love visiting people! We have many college friends scattered all over the country, and its been fun to visit as we travel through. Between those friends, photography friends, and family we have plenty of people to see. Prior to traveling full time, we rarely made it to see many of them because of the logistical difficulty of getting there.
Even though they only get to play for a day or two, my kids are really good at making new friends. They waste very little time being shy, but rather they jump right in and start playing! I’ve also enjoyed the many people we’ve met in various campgrounds, National Parks, or other places.
Packing up our life into a small storage unit really has forced us to decide what’s important. Not just what kinds of things we want because they are convenient, but what we really can’t live without or replace. We also made the decision that spending time together and traveling is more important than dance class, or soccer, or any other activities our kids could currently be doing.
We’ve written about this before, but we can’t get complacent. I love it. I love being forced to choose every day what we are going to do. Yes, we still have the occasional lazy day, but those are few and far between. Most days we are intentional deciding where we want to go, what we want to see and how we want to spend our time.
We love traveling and the benefits its had on our family. We know its not forever, but we’ll enjoy it while it lasts!
I just wanted to say thank you for all of your kind words and prayers! We survived our first garage sale last Saturday even with all the rain and wind. We had a lot of people come out, and it was great to see some of our friends! We sold quite a bit. Between selling on Facebook and our garage sale our total at this point is about $2200 in addition to $1000 I made selling some of my less used photography lenses (don’t worry, I still have 4!). Not too shabby.
We still have quite a ways to go. Knowing that we still need to live in our house for the next 2 months, we’ve kept beds, couches, the dining room table, and the washing machine (turns out our dryer is broken but that’s another story). A lot of our furniture is being claimed by my siblings as one is moving out and getting her own apartment (taking my dishes and pan set too! Hooray!), and my younger brother and his wife are upgrading to a larger one. We also haven’t sold the tools yet as we are still working on remodeling the bedroom in the Airstream. Short answer, this was only the beginning. We’ll still have another big “Tool & Misc” Sale in June to get rid of the last of it. For now though, I’m feeling more relaxed that our house is slowly emptying out. We’ve made great progress in only 2 weeks and I’m really grateful for that!
We are planning on getting storage unit. I have too many wall portraits and canvases of our family (casualty of being a portrait photographer I suppose), we have a nice sleep number mattress that’s worth hanging on to, and we’ve promised the kids we will store any toys or stuffed animals they want. It may be that we’ll look at our pile in a few years and think “why on Earth did we keep that?” but for now its what makes sense.
Sam and I have talked at length about the next time we have a house. One great thing about selling *almost* everything is that we have a chance to start over and create a different life for ourselves. While we don’t want a ghost house with nothing in it, we definitely want to be more deliberate about what we buy and what we keep.
Today I am an emotional mess. Only, it probably didn’t start today, it probably started the second we pulled up to the house in the Airsteam and it has just been building over the last week and a half.
One thing that I struggle with is I fixate on projects. If something needs to be done (craft, home improvement, buy a TV stand, whatever) I seriously can’t do anything else until its done. Sam laughs at me and we joke about it, but I honestly don’t understand why I’m like this. Sometimes its not a big deal, and sometimes its a serious problem. Right now I think I’m falling into the problem category.
We have stuff. Lots of stuff. And I want it gone. Yesterday. I’ve listed a bunch of our larger items on KSL and Facebook and we’ve sold over $900 worth but there’s still piles. Everywhere. Its not DONE. Until all we have in the house is our beds, dressers, furniture my siblings are taking and what we’ll take with us in the Airstream or put into storage I won’t be happy.
It’s ridiculous.
I really need to slow down.
And I don’t know how.
Technically we don’t have to be out of our house until June 23rd. JUNE! That’s like 2 months away. Why am I in such a hurry?
I’m also a terrible mother when I’m here. Remember the awesome-always-adventuring-with-her-kids-and-not-sick-of-them mom I was for the last 6 months? She’s disappeared. Probably has something to do with the whole fixation on getting everything cleaned out of our hour. Super awesome mom got shoved in a closet and crazy mom came out. Sigh.
I’ve really been praying a lot recently that the Lord will change my heart. That He will calm me down, and help me feel okay with my current situation. Just pray for us okay? This is hard. Harder than I thought it would be.
I swore we’d be better this time around. We’d keep exploring, we’d keep traveling, we wouldn’t just STOP. And then somehow we did it anyway! So frustrated with myself. I had so many plans to do FUN things on MONDAY. We weren’t going to wait.Then life completely got in the way and now I don’t have plans to really go play with my kids until THURSDAY. How did I get here?
We had a family council tonight. Due to my frenzied desire to sell every possible item in our house, I’ve been a little…. distracted. Sam has not only been working, he’s been making amazing progress on our Airstream bedroom remodel. The kids have had fun playing with friends, but that is all it has been. PLAY. Without me. Without Sam. I take advantage of their distraction and list a few more items on our FB sale page, or organize one more thing in the garage. Sam is shut away in a room downstairs and we see him only when he emerges for lunch. Even the kids have sensed something is off.
The kids got in trouble for not helping tonight. They were relaxing on their beds reading (something we totally promoted in the Airstream) and were whiny about helping me clean up their room for the Appraiser who is coming in the morning (house needs to be “show ready”. As if we are anywhere close). After 4 minutes of arguing and listening to their whining, I gave up and told them to just go to bed. This led to tears (Rachel) and grumpy faces and more whining (Andrew). To their credit, they dutifully put their Pj’s on, brushed their teeth, turned off the lights and went to bed.
After I cooled down, I went in to go apologize and snuggle. Something was off and we needed to get to the bottom of it. After more tears (both kids) and the” world is ending” dialogue (Rachel) we called daddy and Cara in so we could all talk about it.
We determined we are missing a schedule. While the kids love to free play all day with their friends, they also need structure. We need some school. Some chores. Some WORK. We need more audio books, more family time. Rachel and Andrew want to spend time at places where they have great memories (Trafalga, the swimming pool, the library, Thanksgiving Point). We talked about school and chores in the morning, some designated reading time after lunch, and playing with friends after that. We also talked about everyone cuddling up on the floor in the evenings and listening to our audiobook stories (previously only allowed to listen while driving). We also talked about mom and dad needing help getting ready for the yard sale, and the kids could even earn money by helping with “big” chores.
I feel it was a good heart-to- heart. They went to bed smiling this time, and I feel better prepared to meet their needs. Moving is HARD. Selling all your stuff and moving into an Airstream is HARDER. A lot harder. They are so brave. I’m so proud of them.
We’ll see how things go over the next few days, but I will definitely make an effort to slow down (a little) and make sure we stay balanced.