New Phase – Making Offers! #2023 #Family #Encourage #PropertyHunting #Land #PuttingOffersIn #ExcitedForMovingForward #PrayingForFavorAndWisdom #FutureTartFarm #OpenRuralLand #GenerationalHome
March 15, 2023
New Phase – Making Offers!
Finally!
It feels like I haven’t written in a century! We finally reached the phase of savings where our available investment capital (aka cash in the savings account) is enough to make some offers on certain pieces of property!
We know that the only way we are going to find and afford a simple house with enough family room for our dreams is to build it from the ground up on property we own outright. We are consistently told we don’t make enough. We know this. Oh well, the mortgage on a $160,000 property (15 years, after down payment) is approximately $1400/month ~ guess those who have been renting for $2800/month can’t afford a loan. Can’t change the system, you just have to think outside the box!
Anyway, back to the seriously amazing excitement! We’ve been looking at properties and placing offers within our budget. Our budget will grow as our savings slowly does. Someone will agree to let us buy a property from them – or a miracle will pop up where someone owner-finances half a property or some investor decides our family is worth the risk and does a private loan. I’m open to pretty much anything. We want OR land; our family dream is back to a farm with chickens, our aviary, rabbits, the ability to help shelters again, growing 95% or more of our own food again – we are only offering on spots with at least an acre. A miracle would be 5 or more acres close to the WGV area (like that cool little abandoned spot near the turn to trailmark). Our goal is a generational home. Space for our family to stay close. A farm to share food from. Somewhere our children and grandchildren could always come home to. Saving a tiny bit of Florida’s agricultural heritage (teaching things Grandma Jeanette taught me).
Just sending out offers is super exciting for me! We’ve designed and planned and researched. I keep praying this is our family’s next step.
Hopefully we find something before September (when rent goes up again)! I’m just so excited about seeing the light at the end of this tunnel – it’s been a long road. It’s like a restart. I love restarts!
Searching… They say the hardest part of doing something you really want is waiting and planning. They might be right.
We keep getting to the search part.
We are looking for land or a house on land within 10 minutes of I95 in St John’s County, Florida. The hard part is our budget isn’t high. I just want a place my kids can run free, have their pets, explore, we can have eight or ten cars (family lol) over without bothering anyone else, etc.
I’d love old Florida land like property with a touch of wetlands that no one can ever mess up. We are twenty years in and back to our original dream of land and an old house to redo or land and build our own from the ground up.
It feels disheartening sometimes when I realize that we “wasted” (really just rented lol) years because some mortgage company took a risk and we weren’t able to pay the rest in full. I can’t look at it as wasted, though. I have to realize it was just another step. We can never go backwards in time, always forward. We learn from mistakes and teach others to avoid the pits we fell into.
I choose to look at the positive! I choose to move forward. We saved, started the first one. We saved, we were able to do almost all of our business investments in cash (should have paid off house instead and ran the business on loans, but didn’t understand that the only non-forgibable loans are student and home loans lol, lesson learned to pass along), we can, are, and will save again.
I’m a saver by nature. I run on thriftiness. I carpool to save gas, Louis can do all maintenance on our vehicles except for major rebuilds (did to both to avoid new vehicle payments), the one daughter who has a car has one paid in full, we stretch food so that is a minimal expense (no eating out, lots of grown foods ourselves, lots of beans and rice or spaghetti dinners, canning, leftovers, bulk cooking, etc.), we get clothes and shoes from hand-me-down bags (I usually only buy underwear and socks new), and our extracurricular activities are limited to those places family works for.
My kids even say, I’m a scrooge.
So now, we have a pre-approval! (I know, I shouldn’t be excited just yet.) We can’t do a construction loan just yet, but they said a new home loan (builder has to sell it “done”).
If dreams happen, then we could find a builder willing to build on a rural property with total cost was than 265000 and a simple floor plan
My plans 😂
Simple. (Except my pantry is huge 😂)
In our search, most homes have huge oversized bedrooms and stop at 3. It’s tough to find one with 6 bedrooms… and they’d still be sharing! (That’s because I can’t separate some duos even if I wanted to.)
We have prayed.
Like everything in my life, I have chosen to give the sum nd total of it to God and He will direct us where He wants and we will move on from there. If that means awesome new build with exactly what we want small and simple or a 700sqft existing 2br/1ba that we add on to… We are waiting and praying.
Sometimes music just hits me. I love to listen to songs of all kinds. One of my newest favorites was from a movie we watched a little bit ago – “Speechless.” Even though as an analyst I understand that wouldn’t have been accurate for the culture, still, it was perfect for the movie and absolutely perfect for viewing children to understand that they have to stand up for what they believe regardless of their culture.
Today, riding home, I heard one I’ve always loved but haven’t really heard in a while. Carrie Underwood’s “Temporary Home.” But today I couldn’t stop crying through the song because I could see real people in all stages of the song. In my mind I saw three little children I knew (the little boy), my sister before she died (the single mom), and my Daddy (the old man) – only my mind altered the words to say “old man, chair at home, surrounded by people he loves…” and the image was of all of us at the last Christmas when we were all together.
I can’t stop crying when I hear this song now. Even thinking about it.
My family is (fingers crossed, prayers for God’s will regardless if it is ours) in the process of trying to be approved for a new home in a development that comes with a nature park as a backyard and friends we already know and love as neighbors all up and down our future street.
Regardless of whether we get approved, any house we live in is temporary.
See, I moved all over the place as a youth. 19 times in 19 years (no, not every year, longest in one spot was 2 years 9 days). I always found new adventure and opportunities in each new place.
But I wanted my children to have roots.
When we bought our house, I counted out 2 years and 10 days on our calendar and circled it with smiley faces. It meant so much to me to be in one place. God taught me a lot when we faced the loss of our company, our house, our stuff, our income, and what felt like our future – mostly by means out of our control. One bank gambling that we’d have a chunk set aside (which we would have if we hadn’t just had to pay all of it to cover one driver when wrecked because she drove without our permission while upset) meant that they would accept nothing less – we couldn’t get a loan for the amount our house was “underwater,” because so many foreclosures around us (almost every property sold in our area in the last 3 years had been a foreclosure) had dropped our property from being worth $150K to $83K. Even the lawyer said there was nothing we could do.
God taught me to let go.
Let go of my dreams of one place my whole life…
Let go of my trees, roses, things I had tended for 10 years…
Let go of our animal graveyard where we had lovely trees planted over each of the foster animals whose last home we had been…
Let go of my little farm I loved…
Let go of things that we’d collected…
Let go of our repaired table that had been Louis’ parents, the chandelier Louis gave me for the first birthday I had in our house, the big-screen TV Louis had wanted since we got married but we had finally saved and bought for him the past Christmas, the beds that had been my brother’s and were now my children’s, dressers that had been mine and Katy’s and were now Christina and Becky’s, dressers that my Daddy brought for Becca when I was 13 and now were my dresser/mirror, Kimberly’s dresser, and our shoe cabinet, the baby cradle that my Daddy had bought for my Mom when she was pregnant with me – it had rocked every one of my siblings, a few of my children, and was their stuffed animal bed now…
Each felt like a stab to my heart then. Now? I couldn’t care less about stuff. I’m thankful we got to keep Daddy’s surfboard, the girls’ schoolbooks, their legos, and when the auction people came out and took our one vehicle they asked how we got around and Louis told them “the bikes” – so they left the 6 bicycles and the baby bike trailer by writing “rusted and very poor” over the “bicycles” on the list. (Honestly, every one of them except for Louis’ had come off the side of the road and were rusted, repainted, repaired, etc. so likely not worth any real money.)
Temporary.
All of those things are temporary.
The only thing that is permanent is our relationships – love.
Any house we buy will be our temporary home. We will fill it with love whatever size it is. Yes, we’re praying for a spot with at least 5 bedrooms where the children can at least break into 3-2-2 because I’d like a baby room for Thea and Lucas and we want a “guest bedroom/Grandma suite” because we look long-term at something we’ll be buying for 15 to 30 years! The big girls want to come back and stay as they go through college and until they buy their own home after their careers are established (and Mom is totally okay with that!).
Temporary Home.
If Daddy had heard that song, I’m sure we would have discussed how true it is. I’m reminded of him all the time. I want to discuss the issues arising in my professional career – crossroads that I’m not sure if I’m making the logical or the heart decision. I miss his advice! I heard another country song I’ve heard dozens of times about visiting hours in heaven… Oh wow, do I wish I could just talk to my Daddy again!
Someday we all will leave our temporary home. What will be left is our legacy – our love – our heart. Those we have touched. The memories we made. I pray I make the right decisions daily so that I leave as much of my heart, love, and truth as a legacy for those who love me.
We’ve been planning toward our next step – home ownership. We are grateful for the place we are currently renting, but because of the black mold infestation (it’s under control, but we don’t own the house, so can’t remove it) we are actively looking for a place to own. Somewhere that hopefully, we are smarter about and keep (I still miss my grapefruit trees that had just started fruiting after 7 long years!) forever.
Right now, we are still in the “finish paying off debt” stage, but with end-of-business debt down from over $14K to $800, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after a little over 2 years. (Yippee!!!!) Next step is to have 6 months of expenses in the bank. Then we start saving for a home.
We’re being really picky this time so it will be a while, but it is fun to discuss, think, and plan!
We have learned that the primary item isn’t size or neighborhood, but location. Driving isn’t pleasant for Louis (I don’t like the “wasted time” either, but I use it to dream up stories, interview fake people in my head, and pray.) so we thought about what type of location did we want. We wanted to minimize driving. But what are the constants in our life?
Not work… (Although I hope I keep these jobs until I retire – my plan as Operations Manager is to eventually shift to a few hours in the early mornings or two or three days a week and be available the rest of the time remotely.) Remote is awesome. I get more done in the mornings (like now, at 5am) and I really can’t stand being gone from my family this long (9.5 hours for my 8 hour day – 1.5 driving).
Not hobbies… because we love beach, tennis, walking, bicycling, surfing, swimming, watching nature, growing things… anything active and we usually make those things happen depending on what is around us or in our own yard.
Not even church… seriously, that’s once a week and most of our lives we spent driving an hour or so one way to the church we were called to.
School was it.
Don’t laugh! Yes, we homeschool. I mean St Johns County. The kids will be going to college at St. Johns River State – Christina and Becky are active now, but based on normal college-bound years, we will be driving to and from that campus for 20 years (if we aren’t blessed by any further editions of Tarts). We love St Johns County (yes, it’s extremely pricy and super hard to rent or buy land here, but it has been awesome home-schooling here and we love the people!). St Johns County has a fascinating, amazing array of trade school and college opportunities for our children – I mean, seriously, our teenagers are college-course-takers. Christina’s credit hours mean she’s entering her sophomore year of college as she enters her junior year of high school! Several young friends I know have graduated FCTC and entered directly into the job force at 17 & 18 years old. Two make more than me! So, educational opportunities are our standard constant that won’t change for quite some time. Plus St Johns County puts us equidistant from Embry-Riddle in Daytona and University of Florida in Gainesville (the goal schools of the first three).
This means, proximity and ease of driving to and from the campuses of St Johns River College and First Coast Technical College is the “location” part of our choice. SR 207 out to Hastings, up behind Masters just along the city boundary, over 16 and north along US1 to the old trash road east of Palencia: any open-rural or agricultural property in that range is fair territory.
Both of Louis’ grandmother’s houses are in this range (Wouldn’t one of those be so awesome? To live in your grandparent’s house!) and the house we currently live in is just off that perfect spot, but close enough that yes, we’d buy this land if we could (build a cozy house in the other corner of the land and knock this rotting thing down, but we love the land!) and I like Wildwood Drive. While driving Christina to CAP one day, we saw a “for sale” sign in the yard of a beautiful concrete block house off of Lewis Speedway & Woodlawn on a bit of land. Nice location. Louis pointed out that one was near CAP, which three more plan on joining.
Anyway, location, location, location: OR or AG in easy driving range of St Johns River & FCTC.
The realization that we will be driving students back and forth from one of two college campuses for 20 years… wow, just wow. That’s pretty cool.
