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Moving Out
Jun. 8th, 2023 11:55 pmI currently live in a rural area, about 12 miles from the town that serves as our county seat. In Virginia, cities aren't part of counties, so the largest population sprawl in a county is a town. The school where I teach is in the town 12 miles away. It's about a 20 minute commute for me each way. I've lived in this village since I started working - renting first an apartment, and then a duplex, before buying a condo with my wife not too long before my 30th birthday. We've been in this condo for over 10 years, and it, and the village, have become too small for us.
My wife has wanted to move into town for years now, and dealing with lockdown and other pandemic-related stressors finally tipped me into realizing what she'd understood before me. We needed to move. This past school year, I felt it even more keenly than before, so we decided that 2023 was going to be the year of the move. I started telling my colleagues, my students, my family and friends, etc. about the plan. My wife kept joking that all she wanted for her birthday was a house in town.
We sold our condo without putting it on the market, thanks to the amazing Realtor we'd chosen to work with, and her knowing of a potential buyer who was very motivated to get a condo in our area. We closed in mid-April, with a deal that we could rent back for May and June without paying rent (our Realtor is good, and without making improvements aside from replacing batteries in smoke detectors. We sold for more than we paid, and that chunk of change, while it never got marked in my ledger, sat in our checking account to serve as a down payment for the place we'd eventually buy, whatever that was. The rental deal gave us time to look for and find a place in town, in our price range.
The listing for the townhouse we ended up buying went up on my wife's birthday. We put in an offer, sight just about unseen, and toured after. And oh, boy, did it need work. But! Our Realtor (have I mentioned how awesome she is?) knows a contractor who works on lots of properties she sells, and on her own home, and had him come out to look at the place while we were debating the offer. The amount of work it needed, between his assessment and the inspector's assessment, was about what we'd have had to put into our condo in order to make it "move in ready" to go on the market. So, we're spending the same amount of money we would have had to spend here, but on a place we're going to live in and enjoy.
We closed on the last day of the school year, and our contractor started work about a week later. The place looks so good already, and it's still in progress. I'll probably put a few before and after pictures here once its finished, but he and his guys have done so much of the major work in just a week that I'm super-impressed. He says he'll be finished in another week to week and a half, last we spoke with him, so we're scheduling movers for the last full weekend in June.
We've been packing boxes slowly and steadily (and still have so many more to pack), and taking them to a storage unit we rented in town. Hopefully, the haze will be less dangerous tomorrow, so I can load up my car and take at least one more load over, and then go check up on the progress at the townhouse, and pick up the mail there.
I cannot wait until we move! We'll be out of the condo before the end of June, so we won't owe our landlord any rent at all, and the "security fee" we put up will come back to us (it comes back regardless, thanks to our lovely Realtor), and that can go toward things for the house that we'll need. Like paying for the movers, or getting furniture that we need to replace, or any of the myriad things you need when moving.
The last few months have been a whirlwind on that front, and will continue to be so until the end of June. But it is so, so worth it to have a house that we love, fixed up the way we want, in a friendly neighborhood with an HOA that's well-established and not full of petty BS.
My wife has wanted to move into town for years now, and dealing with lockdown and other pandemic-related stressors finally tipped me into realizing what she'd understood before me. We needed to move. This past school year, I felt it even more keenly than before, so we decided that 2023 was going to be the year of the move. I started telling my colleagues, my students, my family and friends, etc. about the plan. My wife kept joking that all she wanted for her birthday was a house in town.
We sold our condo without putting it on the market, thanks to the amazing Realtor we'd chosen to work with, and her knowing of a potential buyer who was very motivated to get a condo in our area. We closed in mid-April, with a deal that we could rent back for May and June without paying rent (our Realtor is good, and without making improvements aside from replacing batteries in smoke detectors. We sold for more than we paid, and that chunk of change, while it never got marked in my ledger, sat in our checking account to serve as a down payment for the place we'd eventually buy, whatever that was. The rental deal gave us time to look for and find a place in town, in our price range.
The listing for the townhouse we ended up buying went up on my wife's birthday. We put in an offer, sight just about unseen, and toured after. And oh, boy, did it need work. But! Our Realtor (have I mentioned how awesome she is?) knows a contractor who works on lots of properties she sells, and on her own home, and had him come out to look at the place while we were debating the offer. The amount of work it needed, between his assessment and the inspector's assessment, was about what we'd have had to put into our condo in order to make it "move in ready" to go on the market. So, we're spending the same amount of money we would have had to spend here, but on a place we're going to live in and enjoy.
We closed on the last day of the school year, and our contractor started work about a week later. The place looks so good already, and it's still in progress. I'll probably put a few before and after pictures here once its finished, but he and his guys have done so much of the major work in just a week that I'm super-impressed. He says he'll be finished in another week to week and a half, last we spoke with him, so we're scheduling movers for the last full weekend in June.
We've been packing boxes slowly and steadily (and still have so many more to pack), and taking them to a storage unit we rented in town. Hopefully, the haze will be less dangerous tomorrow, so I can load up my car and take at least one more load over, and then go check up on the progress at the townhouse, and pick up the mail there.
I cannot wait until we move! We'll be out of the condo before the end of June, so we won't owe our landlord any rent at all, and the "security fee" we put up will come back to us (it comes back regardless, thanks to our lovely Realtor), and that can go toward things for the house that we'll need. Like paying for the movers, or getting furniture that we need to replace, or any of the myriad things you need when moving.
The last few months have been a whirlwind on that front, and will continue to be so until the end of June. But it is so, so worth it to have a house that we love, fixed up the way we want, in a friendly neighborhood with an HOA that's well-established and not full of petty BS.
