Category: Texas house Page 3 of 4

This picture was taken from our front porch. This is all our property here in Virginia and we feel blessed to have lived here. There is lots of wildlife, forested areas, beautiful agricultural crop fields, rivers, and everything that makes Virginia such a beautiful place. It is not Oregon or Washington, but it is as close as it gets to that, as far as we can tell, on the East coast. We will not have that in Texas, but it truly is time to downsize and move into town, not that I want to admit that.

I had a long discussion with Brad, our friend and the builder of our new house last night. We have been through the plans so many times, there were not really a lot of decisions to make. The only thing missing from the cost estimate is the price of the rainwater cistern. From what I have investigated, it might be a good bit more expensive than what we can manage, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of men. Still, we have enough information to start things rolling at the bank, so I will spend some time on the phone talking to bankers today. I put reminders in my calendar to start turning off services for our house here in Virginia and turning them on at our apartment in Granbury.

Today the house appraiser for our house buyer’s bank came by. As he was leaving, he said there was going to be no problem with the appraisal. The inspection is complete and we have a sense for what it will cost us to get all two items fixed which is not much. So today, Lorena got storage worked out, I canceled the lawn service after one more mowing and scheduled the truck to come get our stuff. We have found an apartment where we want to stay and I hope to apply for that tomorrow morning. Things are coming at us fast now with much to do, not the smallest of which is the downsizing of our household a bunch more. In the meantime, we are enjoying our visitors like this deer that we almost certainly will not see after we move into town.

There is a lot of packing we need to do to get ready for the move, but the temperature is in the low 100’s, the humidity is high and it is Independence Day weekend. It is hard not just to throw up our hands and take a nap. I got stuck doing a bunch of work for my day job that needs to be done before I take time off to do the move, but Lorena actually got a few things done. Today we will do more and need to dive into it hard next week. After our church meeting this morning, we hope to run down to Costco and Home Depot to pick up more packing materials so we can pack a few things this afternoon.

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.