#22 and #23 April 3rd and 10th, 2021 Nomad Life: How we got here
April is just loaded with birthdays: 3 sisters, 2 Moms, and 2 of our 4 sons, plus many more! Our youngest son, Samuel gets the 3rd as his birthday. We hosted him and his wife, Ariel to a nice steak dinner. We enjoyed patio seating with the sunshine. The weather here in Alabama seems to swing between just too cold and some heavy-duty storms to getting hot and sunny and letting us know that the heat of summer is on its way.
We've enjoyed daily walks, and plenty of work from home and me at the pharmacy in these two weeks. This week I took Wednesday afternoon to drive 2 hours to my girlfriend's house in Manchester, Tennessee. Last week we had met at our half-way point and were having lunch when she mentioned that she was going to paint her bedroom. I told her that I was coming to help, and we made a good time out of it. While there I met some of her family at the Wednesday night Bible class meeting. We had some really great visiting and eating times too.
Laura and I have conversations about how to live our lives with goodness and enjoyment of our blessings. I always think more after being with her. I wrote down to 'schedule' the joyful times and friendship builders into my life, and 'schedule' my 'work'. Be ready to break protocol and recieve something that I was not expecting and brings good into my life. Be accepting of the truth. "Be still" and know. Seasons of work have ebb and flow and timing and tempo.
This conversation of tempo has been intregal to Darrell and I planning and experiencing our Nomad life. These thoughts lead me back to some memories of how we got where we are now. Where we are living now was not an instant decision for us. This has been years in the making and coordinating what we are doing and why we are choosing to live this way. We are cognizant that one reason that we have come together this far is because we both want to do this.
Here are questions that friends have asked me: Are you happy living this way? Was it hard to get rid of all of your stuff? When and where is your next trip? Do you miss anything about owning your house? What do you miss most since downsizing?
I want to write a few details about our life, our house and getting rid of our stuff. For the last 11 years we have lived in an ample house with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a deck and a grill out back. We had a yard with trees and super nice neighbors. Three of our 4 sons, lived with us there as they were finishing school and stepping into their adult lives. When we bought the house, the real estate agent was amazed that we had not run screaming from it at the showing! It was a mess on the inside from years of cats and cigarette smoke. We spent 3 full weeks with a lot of family-man-power just cleaning every surface and using kilz and ripping out old carpets before we moved in. Darrell has always brought so many carpentry skills to our ability to upgrade our housing. Over a decade, we redid each bathroom and the kitchen. It was lovely and comfortable for us.
Over the last decade, Darrell and I had also increased our traveling. We each traveled with our jobs and sometimes we would go with one another during work weeks, and we began cruising vacations too. In 2019, we traveled almost a full 6 months, and we were at our home for the other 6 months. We were used to enjoying the movement and the freedom of our times together and our mutual pleasure of the trips and cool places we have been to.
We set our idea of final retirement for March 2022, matching up with Darrell's 62nd birthday. Aside from all of the financial analysis and how we could accomplish this, I was set on being ready to travel and live in England as soon as possible following that date. We were working through and toward these ideas and possibilities for a couple of years as it began to get closer, and feel really close once we were in the pandemic of 2020.
We thought that we would sell our house the fall of 2021, and get ready for our travel in 2022. With that timeline in mind, I decided to begin using facebook marketplace in August 2020 to sell items out of our house. I wanted the full year before bringing our house to the market to get rid of all of our stuff. The first person to come buy a wicker furniture set happened to also be a real estate agent. He asked me about why we were selling and what we were selling so that he could get some good deals. When he found out our plan to become Nomads, he offered to walk through our house and send us comps and an appraisal. We agreed to do that, and about 10 days later we had our house 'coming soon' to the market. We sold and closed on our house by Sept 20th.
During those weeks, I was listing and selling items as fast as I could on fb marketplace. In the conclusion of the weeks, we sold about 30% of our household this way. We gave about 30% to our friends and family who we invited to 'shop' in our house. And we donated the final amounts of household goods.
Was this hard to do? Yes. It was. It was hard to say 'good-bye' to familiar bits and chunks of our life memories held in items that we stored or displayed in our house. I would hit a wall at times, sometimes 3 or 4 times in a day. I would have to just lay down flat, acknowledge what this memory was, and then know that the memory was always with me. Then I would think about being in England in 2 years, and I would know that's where I want to be and this thing has less value to me in my future. The hardest things to get rid of for me were my childhood items, my children's childhood items, and the gifts that I had been given by my friends and family through my entire life.
We came up with ways of scanning all of our pictures into electronic storage. We purchased a small and extremely useful scanner that cost about $150. I scanned every page of every hand-written love letter between Darrell and me leading up to our marriage in 1983. We kept the minimal items of value to us in a fireproof box that we store at a son's house. I kept my great grandmother's quilt in a vacuum sealed bag in one of our truck storage boxes. All other family historical items, mostly from my grandmother Durham, who was born in 1917, I offered and gave to neices and nephews. Some items found new homes in our family and interestingly World War II memorabelia as well as some of Darrell's Army items were happily purchased by a local history teacher.
Being a large project for us, it all happened rather quickly and easily.
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