How Our Journey All Started

I woke one morning after having a dream and my life is forever changed.  In this dream, I received a text from a wonderful next-door neighbor from our old neighborhood.  In the text she mentioned that we needed to come back to our old house because…. Yep seriously, in the dream the text message was similar to when you receive a text when your phone is asleep and it can’t show the whole message so it is just the … at the end because the message is too long.  In my dream, I grabbed my phone, unlocked it and…woke up!  I have no idea what the rest of the text was because my dream ended!  I woke up and was actually angry because I didn’t know what the text said!  Now this dream, mixed with having a conversation with a friend and family member about how the housing market was so high in Utah, made me decide to hop on my computer and do a little searching.

But before I go into this story too far, let me explain a little about our old house.  I ABSOLUTELY LOVED OUR FIRST HOME!  Leaving our first home was like leaving one of my children behind.  I felt it had a soul and was the heart of our family!  However, my husband and I had agreed that it was time to improve our living situation.  Our first home was built in 1910 and had most of it’s original charm, a big selling feature.  We purchased it from a real estate agent who bought it and put her heart and soul into renovating it.  This was no ordinary house flip…trust me…she even re-lath and plastered that baby!  However, we planned to make improvements and make it our own, as most people do when buying a home.  Over time we planned on replacing the roof, adding additional living areas to the attic spaces, rebuilding a garage, and many other items.  In hindsight if I could go back and do it all over again I would have prioritized home improvements and worked on them before my wee little ones were born.  However, the house was still needing the improvements that we planned on making but our situation had changed.  Long story short, we felt it was in our family’s best interest to move into a brand new home.

​Fast forward almost 4 years and currently living in that "new" house and I had this dream and conversation with others.  I hopped online and started looking at homes for sale in Indiana (a friend of mine had been talking about lower land prices there). Originally in the beginning I had been wondering about properties for a family member that mentioned they were going to move.  I had always known that this family member had wanted to live on more land than you get in most neighborhoods so I was looking at homes in other states to see what they could purchase a home in their price range.  The more I looked the more I found some pretty impressive properties!  These properties weren’t just a house and a yard, they were a house with a barn and other outbuildings and a fair amount of land all in the same price range as a 3500 square foot home on half an acre here in Utah.  I was amazed at how many awesome properties there were!

Now one thing that I forgot to mention was that when I woke up from this dream it was about 4:30am so while I am browsing on this real estate website everyone in my house is still snoozing. Several hours later and I am still looking at this site and they begin to wake up.  As they come over to see what has caught my attention I show them a handful of properties.  We all begin to think "how it would be so perfect for this family member to buy a property like that!  Eventually I start thinking if it is so awesome for this family member why don’t I want it for myself.  This was not the first time the thought of land and possibilities intrigued me.  Before Joe and I were married we talked about becoming farmers and we actually traveled to Oregon to look at a 600 acre farm that was for sale.  Now that endeavor would have definitely been biting off more than we could chew, but this idea of having a house on a manageable piece of land was intriguing and we began to joke about how we should move.  This is something that my family and I do often, we like to dream, play would you rather and what if.  After a while we sit down with the kids and make sure that their hopes aren’t too high that we are going to do this.  We tell them that it is 80% likely that we will stay in our house.  We think on it for a couple of days and in the meantime I become OBSESSED with looking at the homes on realtor.com and we constantly talk about the possibilities of moving somewhere else.
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Then one day I came across a property in Indiana that was on 40 acres that had a beautiful farmhouse that had two front doors and an sizeable “pond” (not sure at what size something goes from a pond to a lake but this was a several acres “pond”)!  Guess what, our old house had two front doors too!  Now this is not highly unusual for homes of this age to have doors because back in the day they would have one door be used by the family and the other door was used for entertaining (so I am told).  Once I found this house I thought “maybe this is the house we are supposed to be in”.  I am not normally one to think that dreams are a significant sign, but my heart was telling me that this was something to look into.  So I contacted someone in regards to this property.  I thought I was getting the listing agent but it ended up being an agent nearby to the address of the house.  I thought it was odd because the listing had been on the market for a while and it was pending sale so I didn’t know if it was available or if there was something holding up the sale of the house.  Long story short, we never were able to find out what was going on and a few weeks after that the listing showed off the market.  

After several weeks of me thinking of this possibility we went through and tried to figure out if it would be a logical move.  We talked with our real estate agent and our wonderful lender that we have used for previous transactions.  When all was said and done we realized that it was indeed possible to make this move, we just had to decide if that was what we WANTED to do.

Now like most major decisions, this conversation required a PROS and CONS list.  We sat down as a family and talked about it.  The children were very involved with this conversation and talked about things that were important to them.  They expressed excitement and, understandably, anxiousness over the idea of us moving but realized that it was something that mom and dad had to talk about in great detail.

I will tell you what, it is one thing to decide to move when you don’t like where you live.  However, it is very different to decide to move when you LOVE where you live!  We love our house, our yard, our neighbors, our kids’s school, being relatively close to family, and especially the comfort that comes from living where you have always lived since both Joe and myself were born and raised in Utah.  Through a lot of honest conversations and deep thought we made the difficult and exciting decision to move…little did we know…that was one of the easier parts of this journey.  Be sure to follow me on my blog to read more about our ongoing adventure.