We’ve spent the last week getting our home ready for sale and turning it into a house. You live in a home, you have your possessions displayed around it, your personal and family pictures are hanging on the walls, the book you’re currently reading is out on the table, your paperwork is near the computer ready for you to pick it up again, your quilting blocks are piled near your new quilting machine ready for you to begin sewing and a home looks as if someone actually lives in it. It is a home to living breathing people.
Well, our home now has none of those things:
we’ve put lots of our possessions away so the place looks much neater. In fact we're living our of a china cabinet in the dining room working and eating on the dining room table. We are now living in a spaces just a tad bigger than our RV
we’ve taken down all our personal and family pictures and put up pictures of vases and sail boats, ones you could see in anyone’s house
my current book is in a basket under my nightstand and I’ve got to retrieve it when I want to read
we’ve put all our paperwork away in boxes (somewhere where I can’t find anything now)
I don’t quilt but if I did, I’d have it all stored in plastic boxes piled neatly for storage
It doesn’t look as if actual living breathing people live here but it does look as if anyone could. And, that’s the goal: so that anyone who comes for a showing can imagine their possessions, their family pictures, their books, their paperwork and their hobbies spread around. We’ve successfully turned it from our home into anyone’s house.
And, believe you me, we are tired. We are tired of cleaning houses for sale, we are tired of fixing houses for sale, we are tired of packing things up for moving, we are tired of, well, we’re just a bit pooped.
But, hey, on the other hand, we’ve sold one home and are ready to sell ours. Here’s the website for our home:
Our real estate agent takes great pictures. In fact, I think that’s such a neat looking home that I’m going to call her for a showing.
We’ve been going pretty fast and furiously since the end of January and now we can take it more slowly. Obviously we need to take care of all our ‘stuff’ and find a place for it, whether sale or storage or donation or into the RV for travel. But we can take a bit of time with that - we haven't sold nor closed yet. We know a local storage facility and have a good idea of what we’re going to keep and what we’re going to store so we’re ready to move.
We just need to buy the plastic containers and make arrangements.
And, big news, today, we made a reservation in a local campground for June and July so we will have somewhere to go when we sell. A comforting thought.
Yesterday, over breakfast at Baker’s Square, we looked up campgrounds in the Des Moines area and found one called Griff’s with good reviews. I called and was told that they had one space that was opening up soon and that they didn’t expect many others. Oops. Their website says that they are mostly for long-term campers and I guess that’s so.
Today, Cathy, Gary’s sister came over to pick up some tools from Lug’s home that we had been storing here and, of course, stayed for a cup of coffee on the deck. I mentioned a local campground off the beaten path, described where it was and she asked if it was Griff’s. It seems as if she and her husband, Tom, were looking at an RV there recently. She told us that most of the people there were full-timers who wintered in the south but came back to Iowa in the summer to be near family. She told us the place was beautiful, clean and well maintained. Sounds like what we are looking for and I called back to make my reservation. I didn’t want to miss that last spot that they had. And, we got it. We move in June 1 which we might do, whether the house is sold or not. Certainly would be easier to keep our stuff handy.
So, when our home sells, we have a place to go. Whew. After the spring and summer that we will have had by then, it will be nice to just chill out in a nice local campground.
Besides packing we also have to decide what state we are going to be residents of, where we will vote, where we will pay taxes, where we will get our mail and I think it will be Texas. There is a very large camping association there with a spiffy mail service and lots of campgrounds that they own where we can stay when we are on the road. It will be lots easier to get to Texas each year to renew our licenses than to get to South Dakota, another popular state. When I worked for Wells Fargo one of my responsibilities was to review investment trades for all the clients in central Iowa and their appropriateness for that client. In the process I noted their address and I kept seeing an address in Livingston, TX. Now that I an an RV’er, I know that that is the town where this mail service is and now we will also be calling Livingston, Texas home too. I never thought I’d be a Texan.
Things are moving right along.
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