8/15/16 – Home Free!

George and I have been traveling full-time in our 5^th wheel since 3 days after I retired in the fall of 2010.  The original plan was to take a year and go see the country, but it’s a really big country and we really enjoyed what we were doing.  (You can go back through the blog posts to see where we’ve been or just fast forward to January of 2016.)  Finally, we were ready to sell the house we still owned in Everett, Washington. 

We’d started out with a house sitter—a guy George used to work with—and a couple years later converted him to a renter.  We told him we’d be back in early May to get the house ready to put on the market.  He was interested in buying the house, but sadly it didn't work out.  That took two months.

We still had some furniture and things in the house, and a lot of stuff in the garage, plus more stuff stored in my daughter's garage.  George had a POD delivered to the driveway in June.  That was great fun—the renters were packing and working at their jobs; we were packing and just plain working.

Although our renters had taken really good care of the house, there was still a lot of work to be done before we could put the house on the market.  We started with getting the outside painted even while they were still living there.  It went from the color above to this color called "Coffee Kiss".

Then we interviewed realtors—finally picked one from John L. Scott in Mill Creek.  He’s young, he’s enthusiastic, he's professional—and he’s an ex-cop.  The interviews with the other realtors took about 45 minutes.  Rio was there talking with George about cop stuff for 2 hours. 

The house was empty by the 4^th of July weekend.  She’d cleaned really really well before they left, but there was still work to do inside, plus have the interior painted and carpets cleaned before we could actually put the house on the market.  That took 3 more weeks. We were quickly losing summer for traveling.

The house was finally listed on July 28th.  Open house was July 30th.  First offer July 29th for 21K more than we’d listed it for!  She wanted a two week closing, all cash. Sure!  That works!

People have asked if we miss having a house.  We actually knew before we left that we didn't want to live in the Puget Sound area--too many people, too much traffic.  And we've come back to visit, but it's not really home anymore. What will I miss?

The "garden cottage" George built for me:

The upstairs bedroom that George remodeled into an office:

The garden...I'll miss digging in the dirt.

The RV is where we live and wherever we park it is home.

The house closed on August 12th.  By then we were in eastern Washington at George's daughter's house and drove into Spokane for the signing.

Although we no longer own a house, we’re not homeless.  As my daughter so succinctly put it, we’re HOME FREE!

More pictures:  Selling our house