The Saint of Real Estate

Our house has officially been on the market for five weeks.  We've had quite a bit of traffic so far with 11 tours to date and over 500 views from only one site that we can see stats on.  That doesn't even include how many times it's been viewed on MLS or Realtor.com.  We have received a lot of very positive feedback, but at the end of the day we don't have any offers yet.  We know this takes time, which is why we put in on the market so much earlier than we are planning to leave town.... but we also get antsy. After talking with some of our neighbors one night, they were telling us about how burying a St. Joseph statue upside down in your yard is supposed to help with selling your house.  We laughed, thought it was unique, and then decided to google it to find out more info on what in the world they were talking about.  Upon further investigation, we found that this really is a "thing" people do.  So we figured, why not?  It can't hurt anything, and if it helps, then heck yeah!! So being the impatient kind, we went out and bought a St. Joseph figurine, buried him head down, right by our for sale sign and said a special prayer we found here.   Digging our Saint's hole.

The kids totally got into this and were more than happy to help bury him.

Following specific instructions: Bury him head down, facing the house we are selling.

 Saying our prayer.

Today is April 9th, so let's see how long it takes.... and if it works.

Prepping, Planning, and a Long Overdue Update

Sometimes in life, it's funny how things happen exactly how you expect, and other times it can catch you so off guard that it makes your heart either swell or crumble. When we told our family about our new adventure, there were mixed reactions.  I actually had already written a blog post about this that detailed it all, but then decided it was better to get it off my chest, but not really publish it.  So instead, I'll share this... Some members of our family proved yet again why I love them so.  They weren't necessarily happy about our decision, but they were respectful, understanding, and were able to look at the situation from our viewpoint and really get where we were coming from.  They have been very supportive, and I couldn't express well enough how much we appreciate that. There were others in our family, who couldn't see outside of their small bubble of ordinary to understand anything about this adventure and instead chose to judge and have snarky attitude. And there were others, who I expected would react this way, and were NOT happy.  I almost felt attacked when trying to explain the situation, but knew there wasn't going to be any getting through to them, because there rarely ever is.  It's a sad situation to me, but it seems that's the way its been for awhile now, so I do my best to make my peace with it and move on. That actually leads me to my next thought.  Last night, Aaron was expressing to me how he's been thinking about how he's really happy with where we are at in our lives.  He's happy with the changes we're making, he's happy with the positive outlook in our lives, and that we've managed to get away from most negative influences.  I can't tell you how much my heart sang when I heard him say that.  We both try to brush off the negative and focus on the positive, and its wonderful to me that he is reflecting and seeing the difference that it is making in our lives.  Ohhhhh how I love that man. Once we got through telling the family, we spent a weekend in Des Moines for an RV show. We saw so many campers that they all starting running together in my mind.  We did walk away knowing pretty much what we wanted though, so it was a success!  We have it narrowed down to a few models.  The other debate we have is buying new or used.  If we buy new, we can get exactly what we want.  If we buy used, it'll be harder to find the exact features we want and might have to settle for something else based on what's available.  So basically, we know pretty much what we want, but we'll see what actually happens when it comes time to buy. The next step was getting our house ready to sell.  Surprisingly, we got it ready pretty quick.  We tiled a couple bathrooms, painted a lot of trim, painted the master bath, and did a ton of touch up painting.  I'm sure there's other things we did in there too, but at some point the mind becomes jumbled and you forget.  The house has now been on the market for about a week.  We've had three showings so far and two more scheduled in the next few days.  I'm hopeful from all the activity that it'll go pretty quick and hopefully somewhat easy.

Aaron is working on purchasing a bigger truck this weekend to be able to haul our new home.  We were hoping we could use his current truck, but it wouldn't have been able to hold up with the weight of hauling the fifth wheels we've been looking at. Well that's all of the update for now.  I'll try hard to keep updating as things progress!  

Why? Why on earth?

Why? Why on earth would we want to sell most everything we own and live out of a camper?

As I am anticipating making the announcement that this is the new lifestyle we as a family have chosen, this is one of the questions I'm expecting.

As with any explanation I come up with for some of my crazy ideas, I have many reasons.  While we are so excited to travel the country, see so many interesting sites, slow down a little, and spend some serious quality time with each other, there is one reason that it all boils down to... For me at least.

Because we only live once, and we don't know how long that will be.

So why not grab life by the horns and enjoy every single moment.

Do the things we dream about.

The past year and a half have been life-changing for me.  I've had close, dear friends recently lose babies, husbands, moms, dads, and we almost lost my father in-law.  All of those deaths and near-deaths were unexpected, fast, and traumatic.  It truly has changed my perspective on life.  

I have a little anxiety built up in my chest over telling my parents, my sister in-law, mother in-law, and my husband's grandparents about this move.  Mostly because they are the people who are physically close and will be impacted by this change.  I truly hope they can see where we are coming from with this and will be supportive. I just hope this news is met with understanding, I hope they share in our excitement, and don't start fights over it.   

(I'd like to give credit for the image posted, but it was found on Pinterest and led to a hospice site.)

Introduction to Intentionally Wandering

Hello! Welcome to the new blog!  We are a family of four with two small children, living a wonderful life in a beautiful 3,000 square foot house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, with nice cars, a great elementary school, and a bunch of family nearby.  What more could we ask for, right?

Well.... we are ready to leave it all behind.  We are going to sell our house, our SUV, and pretty much all of our belongings so that we can live on the road.  We will buy a camper, pull our kids out of school, and hit the road to explore our beautiful country.  We will start 'road-schooling' our children, visiting many different monuments, national parks, attractions, cities, etc along the way.  Our intent will be to work on our relationships within our small family, while wandering the countryside to be more of a part of nature.  We will be in some pretty remote locations at times, and will have to learn how to "make it work" when we don't have our regular amenities close by.  There are inevitably going to be moments of insane frustration with each other and with homeschooling our children, as well as trouble with our rig, finding our way, and any other mishaps that happen on such a long journey.  We have no end date in mind for this adventure.  We'll just go until it no longer works for us.  

I will be leaving my portrait photography business behind, and will have to find a way to make some money while photographing on the road.  As the bread winner for the family, Aaron is hopeful that he can work with his current job to turn his part-time telecommuting into a full-time telecommuting arrangement so that he isn't tied down to a certain location.

We haven't told our family yet that we are planning to do this.  They ARE NOT going to be happy.  Mainly, because we'll be taking the children away from them. Plus, this is such a drastic lifestyle difference from the way most people live, so they will have many concerns about how we are going to educate and socialize our children, as well as work and live in a positive manner.

Before we can head out, there are many steps we will have to take first. We sold our beautiful but big dog yesterday to a very nice family who will hopefully love him as much as we did.  It was really sad for us to leave him behind, but he wouldn't have been happy on the road.  He is so large that he would have constantly been in the way in the cramped quarters.  Next, we will sell my SUV.  Again, I'll be sad to see this go, because I love that car.  In the end though, it is just a car and if I want another one once we find a place to land, then I'll get one.  The next big step will be getting our house ready to sell and putting it on the market.  Thankfully, I have a wonderful brother who is a rock star in the real estate world and helped me find another rock star in our area.  I would have loved to hire my brother, obviously, but he isn't in our local area.  After that we will be selling most of our belongings.  We will store the sentimental items and a couple pieces of the large furniture, but everything else will go. After all, we are looking to live a simpler life and after we are done with this adventure, we are planning to live in a much smaller home than we do now.  So we're choosing to sell everything to raise money for the road.

In the midst of all that, we are researching, researching, researching.  We are trying to find a camper that will fit our needs and budget, figuring out if we need to buy a bigger truck, and searching for tons of information about many different aspects of life on the road.  We need to figure out when to break the news to the family too.  I've been pleasantly surprised by the community of full time RV families that I've found so far.  There are some that have small children like we do, some with older children, some that are in their retirement stages, etc.  I'm excited to start meeting these people on the road.  Multiple rallies are held each year for these families to meet and catch up and some even caravan together for months at a time to build strong friendships, for the adults and for the kids.

We hope that you follow us on this journey while we figure out what life on the open road is all about!