WE FINALLY SOLD OUR HOUSE!

Ok, buckle up because I’m about to take you on a journey..

(aka- this is probably going to be a long post, since it’s mostly to help me mentally process all that’s happened this past year!).

A long, long time ago, in a wonderful, but hot city- called Fort Wort- we both had a career change, and it prompted us to look at the bigger picture of what we wanted in life. We subsequently started daydreaming about what our lives could be- we could travel, we could not work as much or as hard, we could actually enjoy life… we could live in a BUS! This would allow us to save money/have less debt, be able to travel more frequently, and figure out where we wanted to live for the remainder of our lives.

To many it may sound crazy, but we talked about living tiny before. Being able to live tiny but also be mobile was high on our current list of priorities. Living tiny for the sake of living tiny never made sense to us- because the majority of tiny homes are stationary. Maybe they can be moved from place to place, but not without a vehicle capable of towing a tiny home, and even then they aren’t made to be moved frequently. On the other hand, RVs are SO EXPENSIVE and so so so outdated (who designs these things!?). RVs were mostly out of the question for us as well. We have friends we went to college with though, and they seemed to have solved this problem for us.

Our friends, Kyle and Kallie, had been living out of a converted school bus for roughly two years. We had watched their journey on facebook, instagram and youtube, and longed for the same type of adventure. We originally talked about buying and building out a bus ourselves, and started doing the research. We looked for retired buses, looked at floorplans and more- our favorite floor plan still being the floor plan in Kyle and Kallie’s bus. So one day David reached our to Kyle to ask some questions. To David’s surprise the bus was for sale, and it was only a half hour away. It may have been hasty, but over the course of about a week, we made the decision to buy the bus we had seen travel all over the U.S. and the one we originally wanted to base our build off of. We bought the bus June 21st, 2019.

The stipulation however, was that we needed to sell our house. We did what we wouldn’t recommend to others if you can help it, and took out a loan to buy the bus. We knew we would have more than enough to pay it off in full once our house sold. It was also a sellers market and we felt confident that with a little work around the house, our house would sell quickly. Oh little did we know…

We did some much needed maintenance, around our nearly 80 year old house- taking longer than we had expected. We didn’t finish with maintenance, repairs and upgrades until August. Then I (Lauren) had a mission trip in August, followed by my brother’s wedding in mid September. We didn’t want to put the house on the market in the midst of traveling, and hosting family at our house for a wedding, so we waited. Our house went to market the first day of October- mistake number 1, 2 & 3 at this point? We had a lot of interest right away- SO MANY showings- always keeping the house clean… but no offers. Our price was just too high, so we lowered, and lowered again. But then the holidays hit- no one was looking to buy a new house.

Finally the week before Christmas, we had an offer! After negotiating, the offer fell through, but we still felt optimistic, and that things were moving in the right direction. The beginning of January we dropped the price again and the showings were booming. We again, FINALLY negotiated and accepted an offer in February. Our closing date was March 12th! We finally could be free of an outrageous mortgage payment, we could travel more often, and we could save money to hopefully help us buy land and build a reasonable home on in the future.

Throughout the end of February, I put my notice into my job, and we started packing up the house. We had a wedding to get to the weekend of our closing, so we actually needed to be fully packed up and out of the house earlier in the week. The first week and a half of March, David’s parents came into town, my parents came down as well. We sorted everything that we wanted to keep, sell, and give away. Anything we were keeping was packed and placed in a moving truck to put into storage. March 8th, David’s parents left with our moving truck to take to Arkansas (where our storage unit would be- in David’s hometown), and on March 9th the bus was fully loaded with what remained, and we hit the road for Arkansas, leaving our empty house behind.

The drive from Texas to Arkansas was about 5.5 hours- maybe longer with the bus going as fast as it could at 65mph. Not a terrible drive, but the drive was about to feel even longer- after we got a certain call. We were halfway through Oklahoma when our agent called us. We initially were just expecting a “have a safe drive and good luck on your adventures” call, but instead we were told [THREE DAYS before closing] that the buyers were backing out of our sale. Unfortunately the wife of the couple buying our home had lost her job the week before, and while she was hopeful that an interview she had would lead her to being hired into a new position, they currently couldn’t qualify for their home loan.

This was not in our plans, as I’m sure it wasn’t in theirs either, but little did we know that things were about to get even worse. Our plan was to take time off, not work, travel, visit family in Arkansas, etc, for at least the first few months. We had also planned to pay off the bus loan, and have the remaining profit from our house sale fund this mini sabbatical. Now we were met with having to continue paying the loan for the bus PLUS pay our mortgage- which we were not expecting to do. To make matters worse, the world would start closing down in just a week’s time.

We initially came to an agreement with the buyers to “hold” our home for them, pending the wife’s hopeful hiring at a new job. It would also work in our favor to keep the house off the market, and be able to list as a new listing a month later- to hopefully attract new buyers. However, over the next two weeks, as the coronavirus came to light, and the world starting coming to a halt, the company hiring the wife would instate a hiring freeze and she would not be able to start her job, present a check to the loan officer, and meet approval for their home loan again. The buyers officially back out of the sale completely March 28th. We did receive earnest money back from the loss of sale, although this really didn’t help out either party (us or former buyers) in the long term.

So here we were, officially jobless and with a mortgage and loan payments that we could no longer afford.

Enter in Covid. If there is one thing we can be grateful for, during this pandemic, it was the option to put our mortgage into forbearance, to defer our bus loan payment, and to have our (Lauren’s) school loans paused. We could not have financially survived without this kind of assistance. While we were embarrassed to have been in that position in the first place, it all came down to extremely unfortunate timing- so we tried not to beat ourselves up about it too much. However, this did mean that we needed to find a source of income and FAST!

Now enter in Travel Nursing! Thank goodness travel nursing exists, and the job opportunities were currently endless. Within a couple of days of arriving to Arkansas, I already had a recruiter submitting my application to hospitals. And since we had the choice to go pretty much anywhere in the country, we chose Colorado.

We had traveled to Denver several times before, knew the city well, and had friends who lived close by. We also both love to ski, and felt this would be a great opportunity to get more skiing done than we normally would in a season. By the end of the week I had applied, been interviewed and accepted a travel job in Denver. So off we went, with a plan to hop between the two state parks for parking- during days I worked- and a plan to do some spring skiing… great idea until the world started to lock down.

We arrived to Denver