Category: Texas house Page 2 of 3

Lorena and I plan to spend most of the weekend packing and throwing away stuff to get ready for the move at the end of July. We have downsized an amount I never would have imagined possible already and have decided to do a ton more. The goal is to get all of our worldly goods into a 26 foot moving truck, the Honda CRV, and Christian’s Acura sedan. Granted, there is not much room in those last two vehicles, but every bit helps. We are donating all our beds and frames (who knows whether they will take the mattresses, but we will throw them away if they are not accepted), a bunch of end tables, all the patio furniture, table lamps, the sofa and recliner from the living room, and anything else we think we do not need or want for the new house. We are gifting a bunch of large planters and a metal garage rack to our neighbors. Hopefully, we will have most of the packing done by the end of next week.

As we are packing things and working our way through the or checklists for the sale of the house and the move to Texas, it has dawned on Lorena and I that there is some likelihood we might never return to Virginia. Maybe we will pass through on a trip to somewhere else, but we have no real reason to return. It has been a lovely place to live. The people and culture in this part of Virginia seem genuinely nice and welcoming. Maybe if I were younger it might be different, but our plans are mostly to spend as much time as we can with Lorena’s mother, Conchita and our children. The kids both currently live in New York City and Grandma Conchita is in Mexico. Beyond that, our main destination will hopefully be to Oregon to visit my siblings and friends. This is not a sad thing. We love Virginia, but are happy to be moving on to the next thing, God willing.

I would like to say we worked really hard in preparation for the move, but it really does not seem real yet. I went through two boxes of compact disks and video tapes (old), throwing out about half and packing half for the move. We are going to do the same tomorrow. We slept in a little, drove into town to get a few things at Costco and a refrigerator water filter at Home Depot, returned home and did the packing, then just chilled. I even drank 100 ml of 1800 Tequila (Jose Cuervo brand) for celebration of the offer–I had to skip all my normal snacks to fit that into my diet budget. All in all, it was a good day. Just spending the day with Lorena reminded me that I have a spectacular wife.

Today is the day Lorena and I start the big push to make our move to Texas. There are a lot of moving parts to this and we are cognizant of the fact that all we have is an offer. The buyer had a lender pre-approval letter, but we still have to go through the house inspection and the appraisal to have confidence the sale will actually close. The inspection is on Tuesday.

The main thing we will do to get ready is pack everything but the minimal things we need to live for the next few weeks. On my short list of other stuff I can do now is the following:

1. Figure out how to get help to load the truck. We need professional movers to assure everything fits and rides nicely.
2. Find a place to rent a truck.
3. Find a short term rental in Texas so we can spend just a few months there to get the house started and get some doctoring done.
4. Make a list of things to cancel when we leave.

Currently, the game plan is to stay in Texas only long enough to do some doctoring (annual health and semi-annual dental checkups and eye checkup), then move to our apartment in Mexico. We were planning to take our car there, but have decided to just buy something cheap and economical when we get there that we can use for the business in Mexico after we move into the house in Texas.

Of course, all of this, God willing.

We accepted an offer on our house here in Virginia today. We were euphoric for a bit, then relieved, because the market is not so good for sellers for our kind of house and price range, now we are kind of wiped out, but excited to get start with the move. I have talked to the insurance agent, made arrangements for movers to come out and give us estimates, and started looking for apartments where we can hole up long enough for the house to get built. God willing, we will be living in Texas by the end of July.

This month has been a roller coaster. We have been up and down with all the stuff we are doing and the lives of the kids. Things are starting to level out now with a to-do list that is growing and has some finite end-points. An agenda of things to do to work toward a finite end has a stabilizing effect on me. It even helps me with my normal day-to-day work that I would be doing even if I did not have some big goal in front of me. Lorena is the same way. We have two showing and an open house between now and Sunday. We might not sell the house, but there seems to be continuing interest in the house. The moment it sells, then we are on a good path to something stable that allows us to start doing some other things projects we love to do. Beside the move, both Lorena and I truly want to maintain our current Bible study schedules, workouts, and diets. I want to accomplish the next GaugeCam goals. And we want to visit family in Mexico and Oregon very soon. All, God willing.

It has been 47 days now and our house has not sold yet. We have lowered the price and are having open houses as frequently as is reasonable as long as people show up. We have tweaked everything we know how to tweak, but there are no bites yet. Just now, I just worked the verbiage that goes out onto the different websites–not sure that will help, but we will see what happens. We might have to stay here for another year. That really will not be so bad financially, but the rub is that we are really ready to get back to Texas and settle in for the long haul.

I did a pretty good render of the front of the house we want to build, God willing.

We got the report back from our house showing last Friday and from two people who came to the open house on Sunday afternoon. The people on Friday loved the house, but the living room was smaller than they expected. The two on Sunday were both work-from-home couples and were worried about the fact that all we have is StarLink for broadband internet. We were relieved that the issues were fundamentally different from the first four or five visitors who all thought the house is to close to a main road (it is not). It was a nice reminder that there are a lot of things that influence buyers over which we have no control, but that it only takes one to pull the trigger. That one is harder to find when the market conditions are not optimal with high interest rates right now. In the end, it really just takes patience. We have been very fortunate in the houses we have sold over the years, only Albany, Oregon took us longer than a couple of months and that eventually sold when we were not expecting it. So, we have decided we just need to be patient. It is all in God’s hands. We cannot start the Texas house until this house sells and that is OK. We actually love living here.