Me and my husband Kevin have a dream: to create a home surrounded by several acres of land where we can develop our relationship with Creation - grow and develop God's gifts (our spiritual, physical and creative natures), and offer workshops and retreats to help others do the same. We call it our Epic Journey. On Sept 1, 2016, Kevin and I walked away from our lives and home in Massachusetts to follow the path of our Epic Journey beginning in Chattanooga, TN. (You can read about that transition in these posts: Moving South & Moving Forward Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) On Aug 31 of this year, two years almost to the day of our last transition, we walked away from our lives and home in Chattanooga to continue our journey on the other side of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina.
As everyone knows, moving isn't easy but we had some particularly challenging situations to deal with this time. We decided to do a "for sale by owner", but paid to have the house listed on the MLS. This was a good decision since we received a text right away from the agent for the people who eventually bought it. But it was a strange situation because the buyers didn't visit the property until a week before the closing. Until then we had no confidence in the sale going to closing. By that time, all the Airbnb apartments I had earmarked for us to stay in while house-hunting in NC were rented, so we had to settle for an extended stay hotel.
On top of that, on the last night in our house and just 14 hours before closing, the water valve to the washing machine broke, flooding our laundry room.
Kevin shut off the water main to the house, which stopped the flood, but it made it impossible for us to wash anything or take desperately-needed showers. And we certainly couldn't go to closing with this problem. At 8 pm I called 5 different "24/7 emergency" plumbers before I finally found one who would drive up the mountain to our house (If you're in the Chattanooga area and need a plumber, call Rooter Pros - they were AWESOME!). Roy arrived around midnight and left about an hour later after putting in new valves. He did such a great job we knew the buyers wouldn't even notice.
After Roy left I stayed up all night doing a thorough cleaning for the final walk-through. Then after the closing, I drove Kevin's car while he drove a 26 foot long U-Haul truck for 14 and a half hours across TN and NC, crawling through the Labor Day weekend traffic, finally arriving at Candlewood Suites at 4:30 am.
In the last move, we loaded a U-Pack trailer ourselves, even though it was transported and stored for us by U-Pack while we house-hunted. This time we decided to save money and do it all ourselves by "simply" packing up a U-Haul, driving it to NC, and unloading it into a storage unit. We knew it would be a lot of work, but Kevin became really sick which made it twice as difficult. It took three days to pack the truck. The plan was to unload it into the storage unit in one day, but it took two. Online I could see that the cubic footage of the storage unit was greater than that of the truck, but I didn't realize that most of that extra space is upward to the 15-foot ceiling. We did some creative stacking, but in the end, we had to rent a tiny extra unit to store my paintings. Using U-Pack it would've been a lot easier in the end. The savings wasn't worth it. Lesson learned.
The worst of all of this has been that Kevin has suffered from a severe cold during this entire packing and moving process. Honestly, I don't know how he did it: headaches, body aches, congestion, hacking cough, and finally an earache we were afraid was going to develop into an ear infection. It's taken him over two weeks to recover and he's still not 100%.
Yes, we've had some challenges. Right now we're technically homeless, reduced from a 2665 sq ft home to a 600 sq ft room, and exhausted both physically and emotionally, but we made it here! We've got Elf, Jasper (the hamster), the houseplants, a guitar, my painting supplies and most importantly, we have each other! On with the Epic Journey. Let the home-hunting begin!
Well, on second thought, maybe we'll wait till after Hurricane Florence rolls over us....
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