For those of you who were reading my blog back in 2015, you are familiar with the House Hunting Chronicles. We were attempting to move closer to my new job. It took a year of open houses, constantly checking online listings, sorting and purging and completing deferred maintenance/upgrade projects. Our home in Petaluma was on the market for six months, 6 MONTHS before it sold to a really nasty and demanding “man of god” from out of state who bought the house as an investment. He was so awful that we had to stop saying his name out loud because everytime we did (kind of like saying Voldemort in the Harry Potter World), he would make a new demand, even after escrow closed. The house in Ukiah we ended up in, which is fabulous by the way, went on and off the market before we were able to make an offer. Somehow even after six months, we managed to purchase the house off-market. We have loved living in this luxurious house, but living in luxury can be very lonely.
Now we want to do the same thing, but in reverse.
We live about one hour and seventeen minutes (without traffic) from our last house. That doesn’t seem like much, but when there is an emergency with family or friends, a desire to drop by and see the grandkids, or when the holidays come around and realizing that we stopped celebrating them in our current home, it feels like an impossibly long drive. We currently live in the same town as my job, and have made some solid friends here; I am surrounded by wonderful colleagues who offer a good support system. Our adopted daughter and her family live here as well. But post-pandemic-lockdown, we realize that we need to be closer to a larger portion of our long-term family and friends support system. There are lots of other reasons that I’ll go into later, but for now: We Are Moving Home. Sonoma County is our goal, and we are not sure yet which town that we will land in.
That means that The Great Purge of 2023 is in full swing! We have spent the last 6 months slowly getting rid of furniture, clothes, and just stuff. Some has been given away, some donated and some finally (and appropriately) identified as trash. We aren’t done yet, but we are on the home stretch. I’m hoping to order home inspections in then next week and turn our attention to the BIG CLEAN.
Stay tuned for snarky comments (and pics) about online home sale websites, musings on hoarding, and how we have created and learned to live with a chaos cloud above our heads.
Visceral Musings 