April 2023: It’s getting more real now – countdown to fully nomadic

This is a ‘catch up’ post in our adventure of downsizing and embracing a nomadic lifestyle since I’ve been a bit distracted of late. We’re at day one of the ‘nomadic’ part of the adventure (still in Central Oregon for now) so I’ll add my thoughts on that this evening.

(11 April 2023) The past couple of weeks have seen a flurry of activity towards the sale of the house. There were several projects that had been on hold due to design questions (the railings on the deck) or motivation (digging a 75’ trench to properly bury an electrical cable to the hay shed) or weather (finishing up staining the skirting on the deck and refinishing the deck on the old house). 

We scheduled a real estate photographer to take listing photos and have a published ‘go live’ date for the sale of the house, and that put the pressure on to get those things sorted. Getting organized enough to have a professional come in and do an estate sale so we don’t have to waste hours and hours of our time as well as stressing out about pricing things we’ve become somewhat attached to. That’s a bigger burden for me than her, emotionally, but I came to a place of peace last week – basically, I said to myself “If you lost everything in a fire, what would you actually miss enough to replace?” If it ain’t on THAT list it’s going away in the sale.

We had been trying to get a load of gravel delivered and they kept blowing us off; finally on Thursday we got 10 yards of gravel. Photographer was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday so, no pressure, LOL. A combination of crap weather and a hydraulics problem with our tractor meant we wound up relying on our neighbor to come over with his skid steer to finish spreading it. Which was fine except he couldn’t do it until Monday morning and finished about 20 minutes before the photographer showed up.

Then on Tuesday we got a full-price offer. Which is ‘yay’ but also ‘Dude, we literally just spent $500 for photos YESTERDAY which I might as well have set on fire, LOL’

Presuming this goes forward – and I have no reason to think it won’t at this point – now we have a real deadline to not only get rid of 40 years’ accumulation of random stuff but also find someplace to live. Based on the way the offer was written, they are understanding of the fact that we need a little flexibility with the closing and moving dates so, that’s a positive.

Realistically we have 6 weeks, maybe 8 at most, to find someplace to live for some number of months until we hit the road.

The timeline for going nomadic is still flexible; our only ‘commitment’ is that I booked us a place to stay in Panama City in mid-November and told my friend that lives down there we’d be coming out to his area of the country after Thanksgiving weekend.

Truly though, we could leave as soon as the sale of the house closes if we decided to. It would only require that we make that the plan and divest of the last of our stuff a bit sooner. 

I’ve reminded both organizations where I am a board member that my time is running down; our local road district is the shortest notice because once we move out of the neighborhood I’m no longer eligible to be on the board. 

In the process of getting ready to move we have sooo many small things to take care of. Particularly in my case, since I have several cars in the project stage that need some level of work done in order to sell them for actual money. Our extended crummy weather is to blame, in a typical year we would have already had quite a few days of decent weather (above 50 and dry) so I would have been comfortable working outside. Since I am not at all okay with working outside when it’s below 45 and/or raining/snowing there are a lot of projects that got pushed back so now I’ll have to crunch.