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In less than two weeks, we are moving to a whole new city. Corey is working with a new firm in Charlotte, NC which means a pretty big move for our family. We want to stay in SC, so we will be moving a little town just inside the state border, about an hour and a half from where we live now. We currently live in the same town I grew up in. In fact, for the last two and a half years, we have lived in the same neighborhood I grew up in. Cullen has been going to the same elementary school I went to. Almost all our family lives here, and we are leaving what we thought would be our forever home.

I am currently feeling all the emotions. Nervous about such a big change. Excited for a new adventure. So sad that we will go from living in the same neighborhood with one set of grandparents and only thirty minutes from the other, to living almost two hours away (considering traffic and never-ending highway construction.) But mostly, I am hopeful for what this means for our family. I know that God has a plan and we are just doing our best to follow His direction. I am also excited that we will be moving to the same area as my brother and sister-in-law and also much closer to Corey’s sister and her husband.

When Corey took this job back in December, we planned on keeping the kids in their schools here until the end of the school year. We wanted to make this change as easy on them as possible. But after over two months of being separate from Corey and solo parenting three or four nights every week, we decided it was better for us to all be together as soon as possible. We also think it might be easier for Cullen to make new friends during the school year rather than over the summer when he wouldn’t have as many opportunities to get to know other children in the area.

I have waited so long to share this news publicly because I wanted to wait until all of our ducks were in a row. Corey has been living up there since the first of the year and coming home on weekends. We have spent the past few months looking at so many houses and getting our house ready to sell. Once our house was listed, we had multiple offers and were under contract within 72 hours. We were less than two weeks from closing and the sale fell through due to buyer financing. At the time, I was really mad about what happened and how it happened, but we re-listed the house and were back under contract the next day. We have once again gone through inspections and the appraisal and we are now ready to close on the sale of our home here.

We are currently selling or donating anything that we don’t love or won’t fit in our new house. Everything else has to be ready to be loaded on the moving truck this weekend. We are currently surrounded by boxes and are surviving on the bare minimum. This next week or so will be an adventure in minimalism and making due with what we have.

As soon as we close here, we will be set to close on our new house. I’ll share more about our new home later, but it is very different than what we are used to. We are actually buying new construction. I have always loved an older home that needs some love, but with our budget and what the area has to offer, we just couldn’t find anything that met all of my specific requests. So even though our new house is much different than what we thought we would end up buying, we think it will be a great fit for our family. I am going to miss our current house so much, but I am looking forward to decorating a new house and making it feel like us!

Honestly, the basement was just a bonus for us. We do most of our living, for now, on the main floor. These will likely be some of the last rooms that we make any  major changes to. We hope to have an actual office down here so that Corey can work from home on occasion without the fear of interruptions. And I’m sure that when we have teenagers in the house, they will be fighting over who gets the basement bedroom.

Living Room

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We bought this house (our second, and possibly final home) over the summer. It was built in 1972 and not a lot has been updated since. It has only had two owners; the man we purchased the house from lived here for thirty years! The main floor has three bedrooms, two baths, the kitchen, mud room, dining room, formal living room, and den. The last owners added a sunroom and finished out the basement with a fourth bedroom, third full bathroom, living room, office, and storage room. Everything needs to be repainted, every room needs new flooring, and the kitchen and bathrooms need major updating. But we are excited about the potential this house holds.

Below is a tour of the main floor. I’m going to go ahead and apologize for the quality of these pictures. The lighting is one of the major things that needs to be addressed. We have already started updating a few things, but this is what the house looked like on move-in day (or when we went to look at the house in some cases).

Entry

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Before I share any more about our new house, I wanted to share one final tour of our first home. When we bought this house, it was a foreclosure in pretty rough shape. It was missing most of the flooring, all appliances, light fixtures, it was all kinds of crazy colors, and there were holes in the walls. It improved a lot over the seven years that we called this house home.