What Ana Does

This is the hard part. Sure, we're not actually doing the packing, thanks to the movers, but this feels stressful. It feels like carrying a 100 lb weight on my back. Seeing all our belongings and questioning 10 times an hour if this was the right decision. And how will we ever be so comfortable again!?  Having done this before ... seven times ... we know that it will all be worth it. Change is always good. Being uncomfortable is a place of growth. And there are brighter days ahead.  Speaking of GROWTH ... I took some photos of the girls by the wall we measured them by for the last night years.   Point to how tall you were when we first moved in ...  And the Sticker Door! On all our adventures, we'd collect stickers to put on the sticker door. "That's a great Hawaii sticker, we'll put it on the door!" We pulled off anything within reach and could come off easily. Hope the new owners are planning to get a new door ... or enjoys funny stickers.  Last but not leas

The story ends on the first house we put in offer in.  Too much money, time, patience to bring this lovely house into 2021. But it was very fun to explore the house ... after 6 months of house hunting, this is the first one I got to walk through.  Some very beautiful details. On to the next one ... 

House hunting in a pandemic; would not recommend.  Especially out of state.  And during an unprecedented, insane market.  It's deeply a seller's market, so that's good for us as we are selling our house for exactly what we wanted to get for it, as is, without having to put in time, money and effort to fill holes, update mechanicals, repaint ceilings, etc. The punchlist I had was made completely obsolete when the buyer bought quickly and "as is."  But on the buying side, it's pandemonium. In our ideal location, it's also the ideal location for families exiting big cities (ie. Philadelphia and New York) as companies are becoming more sympathetic to remote work -- some companies even selling off office space to keep employees working from home. So there's that: lots of buyers looking in this one area.  Then there's sellers who are hunkered down for the duration of the pandemic. Financially, they don't want to rock the boat and move. Or they see th