The End of the Beginning

We did it!!! Today at 10 am, we had our closing, which went without a hitch…and our house is SOLD. We have the checks in hand, and I will deposit them into our account tomorrow when I go to work. We don’t feel free yet. I don’t think it will completely feel real until we get wheels on the road and start heading someplace new. (Although Harry is enjoying the thought that he doesn’t have to think about clearing the driveway if it should snow.)

So…I was thinking earlier about how the whole journey has progressed…from the time we first decided to pursue fulltime rving…to today. Looking back, I can see that some of the choices we made along the way really helped make the transition go so smoothly at the end.

• Make a Plan

Once we decided to sell the house, really decided…one of the first things we did was come up with a plan. We listed all the improvements we wanted to make on the house, from the smallest to the largest. It was five pages long – typed! We labeled a paper with each year, and divided all the tasks up as evenly as possible. Then we stuck to it, which was almost as hard as coming up with the list in the first place. Even though it was a lot of work, Harry and I both think that updating the house was important, and really helped us to get a pretty quick sale.

• Start Early

To get started early was just as important as planning. We made the decision to fulltime rv back in December 2009. Back then, Harry’s retirement in 2013 seemed like an eternity away! If we hadn’t made a list, I don’t know if we would have started as early as we did. But looking at the list of things we needed to do, and the amount of stuff we had to get rid of, I just knew there was no way we could accomplish all that in just a few months. And while it was a bit of a downer in the past months to live in an empty house (and I think people who saw our empty cupboards thought we were crazy), did it ever make the transition easy. Once we had a buyer, clearing out the little bit of stuff we had left was so simple. We were so glad that we had already done most of the hard prep work.

• Research

Both Harry and I have our own focus for what we want to learn about. Harry likes the technical stuff, while I am not really into that. I’ve done a lot of my learning by reading blogs and forums. No matter how you like to do your research, I think it’s so important to learn as much as you can; it helps to take out a lot of the uncertainty about the lifestyle changes in store. We also spent many hours watching home buying shows and shows about staging. I think that helped us so much when it was time to prepare our house for viewing. And, I think we really benefited from finding a realtor early and getting her advice about our house prep.

For what it’s worth…a few thoughts…

And now…here we are…at the end of the beginning…it’s been quite the ride so far, and we hope that the best is yet to come!!