A Monumental Step

Our house is officially for sale! Finally!! It feels like we’ve been waiting for this moment forever, although it’s actually only been a few months. So many steps in this transition are dependent on selling our house. We need the house proceeds to buy the RV. We can’t sell the furniture yet because we need it to stage the house. We can’t commit to a potential work opportunity for the summer until we know that we’ll be able to be there in time. So this has been a long time coming and is a monumental step.

We are excited to finally reach this point, but also a bit anxious. There have been 3 houses which have sold in our neighborhood in the last 6 months. 2 of them sold within a couple of weeks and both during a slow market! Although we have come a long way in purging and organizing our stuff, we still have a lot more to do. If ours should sell that fast, things will get very chaotic very quickly. We are both still working full-time and can’t imagine how we would pull it all together. But I guess that’s a good problem to have and I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Like everything so far, it will all fall into place as it’s meant to be.

So now I guess we sit and wait. Well, not really. We have a lot planned for the next couple of weeks. Most notably is the Denver RV show next week. This is another event that we’ve been anxiously awaiting. The local RV dealers don’t typically carry a large inventory over the winter so we haven’t been able to see several models that we’re interested in. We’re hoping that there will be a good selection at the show. It is billed as the “largest show in the Rocky Mountain region”, although that could be very relative. I’m sure it will be nowhere near the size of the upcoming Tampa show that many RV-Dreamers are attending. I kind of wish we had planned a trip to Florida, but we didn’t so we’ll see what this holds. I’m a little concerned that a couple of our top manufacturers will not be present. They are not on the exhibitor list on the show web site, but I’m hoping that the website is just out of date. If not, then I suppose a road trip out of state, either to their factories or to a dealer who carries a larger inventory, will be in our near future. We really want to be sure of our decision because we don’t expect to be able to afford to trade up in a few years.

Another notable step that I haven’t shared yet is that I told my boss that I would be leaving. Tracy had told hers a couple of months ago, but I was keeping mine quiet, mostly because I was unsure of the reaction I would receive. My company has been struggling for the past year and there have been many rounds of layoffs. I was a little worried that I would be on the top of their list if they knew I was leaving anyway. As much as we’re both ready for a break from our jobs, we know that we need the income stream for as long as we can keep it. I wasn’t really planning on telling my boss until we had a contract on the house, but we came to the conclusion that we really needed one of us at home to start working on the final preparations, especially in the event of an early house sale. So I broke the news and have worked out a pretty favorable transition plan. I will stay on through mid-February and then we’ll reevaluate and may negotiate for me to stay on longer. I’m grateful that I have been able to go out on my own terms.

As we knew, January would really kick start the transition process and it has, but it still doesn’t feel real. So when does it all sink in? When we no longer own a sticks and bricks house? When we buy the RV? When we’re rolling down the road? Or will it always feel like a dream?