If you follow me (or my wife) on social media, you may have already heard the news. If not, here it is: we’re moving.
This decision has not been easy, at least not for me. We’ve been looking at houses off and on for about two years now. (As I like to say, we’ve been “looking,” but not “looking-looking.”) We’ve attended at least a dozen open houses, and this is the first one that met enough of our needs for us to even consider. So while the search has been long, once we found this one, we had to make the decision very quickly.
The new house has a lot of great things going for it. Although it’s only a mile away from where we live now, it’s officially in the Yukon school district. Although we currently live in Yukon and our kids have attended Yukon schools all their lives, we are zoned for Piedmont schools. That means each year we have to transfer the kids into Yukon schools, and it’s getting more difficult each year. Yes, there are ways to “beat the system,” but moving into the Yukon school district takes a huge mental burden off of us.
The new house also has a huge backyard — 3/4 of an acre, which will give us room for both a pool and a backyard workshop, two things we had at the last house that we don’t have room for at our current house.
Finally, the new house is new — as in, brand new. While our current house doesn’t need any big repairs at the moment, it’s almost fifteen years old and needs the standard maintenance that a fifteen-year-old house needs. Some things need painted, and a few things need replaced. We’ve never owned a new house before, so that’s kind of exciting.
The downside is that the new house is smaller than our current house, although it’s barely fair to compare the two. Our current house is 4,250 square feet, and most likely the biggest home we’ll ever own. In many ways, and I didn’t really know this was possible, it’s too big. There are multiple areas and rooms we simply don’t use. We’re constantly texting the kids to let them know dinner’s ready. The new house is a hair over 2,800 square feet, which is probably close to the square footage we actually use in our current house. (That doesn’t include the workshop we’ll be quickly adding to the backyard.) As Susan recently reminded me, it’s a downsize, but not a downgrade. The thrill of owning a two-story house wore off for us, and we’re hoping a one-story home will be a little easier to maintain as we get older.
The other downside is — oh, dear Lord — it means we’ll have to move. Even though the new house is only a mile away, it still means boxing up everything we own and getting it from our current home to the new one. It looks like we’ll be closing around the end of October; better than moving in the middle of the summer, I suppose.
Of course there’s stress related to all the unknowns. Will we like the new house? Will the kids like it? Will we like the neighborhood? Will we like our neighbors? Will they like us? What furniture goes? What furniture fits?
Today, during my lunch break, I packed the first tub of toys. We’ve got roughly six weeks before moving day, and I’ll need every one of those days to get things boxed up.