We are moving this summer from a small rural town to a nearby college town. The larger population and schools will be the perfect fit for our teens to finish out high school. And we love the new-to-us house!
It turns out we have a house type and pattern. It took me 4 houses over the years to notice. We find older houses (built in 1898, 1916, 1925 and 1940) that need a lot of work and we can purchase below market value. We slowly do the work ourselves over about 8 years to get everything updated and functional. Then we notice we can sell the house at a profit and we start back over. We aren’t making ourselves rich with this process by any means. But we are easily covering our living expenses and investment any money we put into rehabbing each house with some left over for retirement and college savings. And we’re helping dress up old houses just enough that they will stay desirable to new families instead of falling into disrepair and eventual demolition. That feels pretty great.
This is the first time we’ve moved our teens from one school district to another though. So this move feels like a bigger step. We did choose to stay super close to our most recent place (about a 20 minute drive) in an effort keep all the great friends we’ve made. Also, we’re downsizing in number of bedrooms and overall space this time. That is great for lightening our load but takes time to figure out what should go and what should stay.
With projects going at both places right now, this move feels more chaotic than I remember. Some of the projects we have going at the old house are a last-minute kitchen update (it’s beautiful but take my advice and never decide to do a major kitchen update in the middle of moving houses and also working on projects necessary for the move-in at a new house), a deep clean and paint touch up of all the rooms, fixing the carport that we kept thinking we might replace, washing all the windows inside and out (after seeing what a big difference this makes I’ve decided I will start doing this at every house, every year) and finishing the flooring in the craft room we converted from attic space. Some of the projects we have going at the new house are a toilet fix, replacing and painting sections of the privacy fence, yard work to take it from overgrown to as beautiful as I know it can be (this is on hold while I recover from the last 12 days of the worst urushiol reaction that I’ve ever had….I finally gave in and went to the doctor to start both an antibiotic and steroid for the reaction that just kept getting worse), adding ceiling fans, installing new AC/Heat, radon-mitigation in the basement so we can convert that space to a master bedroom and more. Each new bit that we finish feels great but the list is long. I’ll be glad when we are done, done, done and can start settling into the new digs!
