Happy List Day!

Well it's listed! By the skin of our teeth we finally got it listed! The past week was not without trials but the freakouts were limited. I think I only cried once, so that's progress! We learned some lessons and the house ended up looking great! 

Our realtor Tim Cantrell bent over backwards to get our house on the MLS today. I’ve had it in the back of my mind that a Friday would be an excellent day to list a house. I recently confirmed my suspicions with a quick google search. I found multiple real estate pros agreeing that Friday is, in fact, the best day.to list ones home. One article said houses making their MLS debut on a Friday are 12% more likely to sell in 90 days. They are toured 19% more often, and sell closer to asking price than homes listed earlier in the week. I told Tim I wanted it to hit on a Friday so that is what he did. Thanks Tim!

The amount of help our families have given us has been incredible. Dad is figuring at this rate he will be owed about 20% of our profit. He's probably being kind with that estimation. My dad has lent us a plethora of tools and one of his trucks. He also spent several days helping us replace the siding, rebuild the deck and paint. Not to mention all of the days off he has allowed me to have (My dad also happens to be my boss). Mom has been totally cool as well. One day she took it upon herself to do all of our laundry (she even ironed everything!). Another day she came over and made us all an amazing spaghetti lunch. Eric’s family has given us a ton of those rubbermaid tubs (the fancy ones with the wheels) to store stuff in as well as all kinds of stuff to stage the house with.. My grandfather let us use his industrial paint sprayer. While my Aunt Lori is here visiting she has basically re-landscaped our yard and has been a big help staging the house. Then there are all of our friends who lent a helping hand. Our dear friends Chris, Big Chris and Ryan came over and installed new carpet in the two spare rooms as well as the hall. Morgan (who is busy enough planning her wedding) spent a very cold morning helping me tape up all the windows and trim before we painted. We absolutely could not have gotten all of this done with our their help. I cannot explain how grateful we are to them all! It is bittersweet and a little bit ironic that we are doing all this, only to move so far away. 

The Manley Men

The teacher of many life lessons

Gorgeous even doing yard work

Chris Ryan and Eric working hard

Aunt Lori works late into the night

Life lesson learned this week: If you’re not sure of the type of paint you’re painting over, PRIME IT! We made the sad mistake of painting over our decks with latex paint... decks that were previously painted with oil based paint. I must be getting better at rolling with the punches because I'm not that upset about this mistake. My dad told me what we had done wrong afterwards and comforted me with the fact he had once done the same thing. We are here to learn and learn we have.

OMG we painted it black!

Completely changing your life is stressful. It has been a constant struggle going from elated excitement to straight up panic attacks. Selling our house is an integral part of the plan. Once the house sells we will buy the airstream and the truck to pull it with. For the past three weeks we have been preparing to list our house. We have replaced large chunks of fascia and a good amount of the cedar board and batten siding. We’ve painted the interior and thrown away or donated like 70% of our belongings. We painted all of the cabinets and installed new appliances, faucets, door knobs and cabinet pulls.

After multiple trips to 84 lumber and Lowe's Eric and my dad got the siding back up.

Between painting and declutting, my house looked like this for weeks.

Learning to live with less is going to be hard, but worth it.

In the past week alone we have rebuilt our front porch and painted the exterior! And yes we totally painted our house black, well Thunder Gray to be exact. Painting your house such a bold color is scary. We got halfway through the project and had to go get more paint. As we backed out of our driveway I looked at my half yellow half black house and began to sob uncontrollably. “OMG its so much darker than we thought! Holy S*** it's black, we painted our house black! Who does that? Is that even a thing? Do people paint their houses BLACK!” Eric tried to reassure me but in my mind all I could think was that we have ruined our house and it will never sell. Looking at it now I realize its going to take more than 15 gallons of black paint to crush our dreams! Three days later, we have received compliments from everyone who has seen it. The entire neighborhood is abuzz with how nice “the kids” house looks (All of our neighbors are much older and much wealthier than we are so they lovingly refer to us as “the kids”). The life lesson learned here was to trust yourself. I picked an awesome color, second guessing myself only caused unnecessary stress.

Demolition of the poorly built front porch.

My dad 'supervising' the porch rebuild.

The little house that dares to be bold!

Another life lesson I am actively working on is rolling with the punches. Today was our list day goal. The weather set us back, so we will miss that goal by a week. I cried when I realized it was just not possible to paint all of the exterior trim, stage the garage, lay mulch, and deep clean the entire house in two days. Even more unrealistic are the little things that I plan on doing, like having all the coffee cup handles facing the same direction and fresh flowers in the bathroom. (I’m hoping the flowers and coffee cups say “this woman really has it together… she must have good taste and be totally awesome. I want to buy her house”). I had to realize that doing all of this in such a short amount of time was just too much. My fitness endeavors have taught me the importance of taking pride in how far you have come, rather than worrying about how far you have to go. Eric and I have done a lot in these past three weeks, so I'm not going to beat myself up over not reaching my overly ambitious goal.

The new plan is to list on Friday the 28th. Wish us luck and here's hoping for a week free of panic attacks!

That's cool... but why?

Why, is a question we have been getting a lot lately. A question to which I often reply "Why not?" but here is the real answer. Sometime last year Eric discovered his talent for coding and has been teaching himself in his spare time. Now he has the opportunity to attend a three month intensive training program at Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. Dev Bootcamp is like an apprenticeship on steroids. The idea is that web development can be taught in a much shorter amount of time than it takes to get the typical CS degree. The students are completely immersed in code for 9-12 weeks. Post graduation hire rates at DBC are about 90% within 3 months, far better than recent college graduates. That, combined with the near perfect weather by the bay made this an easy decision. 

So, why the airstream? Well, a few years ago I heard a song by Regina Spektor. In part of the song she describes a simpler life that appealed to me “Lets get a silver bullet trailer, and have a baby boy. I’ll safety pin his clothes all cool and you'll graffiti up his toys”.  After listening to this song like a thousand times, the Airstream seed was planted. I think the sticker shock of  housing prices in San Fran helped the idea really take root. 

Just by purchasing a vintage Airstream here in the South East and driving it to California we should actually make money. Hopefully if we buy it right and polish it up, we will have a nice home with some sweat equity. At the very least, though, we wont lose money on the deal.

So that's why. I'll explain how we plan to bring this dream to fruition in another post, along a few life lessons we have already learned on this journey.

And so it begins

Mom… Dad… Friends,

Eric and I have something exciting to tell you. I am not pregnant. This is actually cooler than that! We are selling the house along with everything in it and moving to California. Eric is switching gears professionally, it turns out he’s got a knack for web development. Now, y’all don’t freak out. We wouldn't just up and move the 2859 miles from Howey in the Hills, FL to San Francisco, CA without a solid plan.

That’s why we are going to buy a 1970-something Airstream travel trailer. And no I don't think we are ruining our lives. We aren't “living in a van down by the river”. We’re going to park that baby right on the Pacific Ocean at this darling little trailer park  rv park "park". Think of it as an Airstream down by the bay. Doesn't that sounds lovely?

Photo by Wendi Nordeck via Nesting Newbies

If everything goes as planned, we will be calling our Airstream home for at least 4 months. The possibilities are endless after that. Maybe we will take our new home on down to South America and hang out for a while, or maybe out to Denver, CO (looking at you Cydney and Garret). Maybe we will fall in love with the West coast and stay in the City by the Bay. Or maybe we will be so sick of living full time in our RV that we sell it and pick a more traditional home. Either way we are about to embark on a pretty amazing adventure! I hope you guys will follow us!