Another huge life update
It’s amazing how quickly time can fly and as a mother of young children, the best of intentions of are just that: intentions.
I started this website around 9 months ago with all intentions to keep it updated and start homesteading and start a business, but all of that has fallen through the cracks.
The selling of our house was a lot more stressful and took so much longer than we expected. We spent every spare hour in April and May fixing the rest of the house up: the master bedroom, complete bathroom gut, and complete kitchen and dining gut. We did it without hiring any of it out; we did it with five kids and working full time. And as we neared the end of the projects, we saw the interest rates start to rise. We had had so much hope due to my ex selling his house within a day and our neighbors selling theirs within a day too. But all of that slipped through our fingers when interest rates spiked and everything came to a halt. All in all, the house was on the market for about 2 months before we got our first and only offer; an offer so much lower than we expected and an offer that didn’t leave us near where we wanted to be with equity. But we were advised to take it if we wanted to move, and in the end, the realtor was probably right. I did a Zillow search a few months later and found similar houses in the area that went for sale at the same time were still for sale!
The front deck view from our house we sold in Red Oak
While we waited for a bite on our house, we had purchased a 5 acre lot with a contigency on our house. We had so many great ideas to build and start our homestead but were completely unprepared for the amount of numbers you needed up front for the bank. We had contractors that wouldn’t call back or wouldn’t show up at the site even when we drove an hour out of our way to meet them there. And if you can’t get the numbers, you can’t get the loan. We extended the land contract once, and in the end, had to cancel the contract.
That left us at square one, with a closing on our house fast approaching and nowhere to live in a town 2.5 hours away. Interest rates were still climbing and the amount of houses coming for sale was abysmal. While looking for houses over the coming months, we spent so much money on Air Bnbs, hotels, and eventually a camper. The camper…..
If you have never “lived” in a camper, it is definitely living as minimally as possible. It is not the same as vacationing in a camper. The weather was not nice as we started our journey at the end of October. The only campground open at this time did not have water or sewer hook ups, so that meant filling the water tanks and emptying the feces about every three days, a chore I had no idea was so involved. Water pressure didn’t exist and so the kids maybe took three baths the whole time we were there. Chad and I went days without showering and wore the same clothes for days in a row when not working. And yeah, going to work: not very practical for either of us to get ready at 4:30 AM in a camper without waking the entire group up. Just typing about that experience makes me cringe and be so thankful for our everyday amenities we take for granted. The camper journey ended when the first freeze came and we no longer had any way to get water or flush a toilet.
Throughout this whole journey it was easy (and not so easy) for me to forget I was (and still am) pregnant. The stress my body has endured this pregnancy has me wondering about the temperment of what this new baby will be like. There is a strong understanding that stress during pregnancy forms different neuro pathways in baby’s brain. It is said that moving is one of the biggest stressors in life, but add in moving weekly, crumbling finances, two house closings that fell through, complete lack of sleep, a huge parasite detox (more on that in another post) and driving most of my day for months on end with two toddlers, and my nerves have just been shot this pregnancy, completely shot.
Then in November, we moved into a rental that was far too small and came with many issues. We knew immediately we had to keep looking for houses to buy as this rental was not going to sustain us for a year with a family of 8. It was three bedrooms and 1200 square feet, most of which was upstairs in one bedroom. During our time there we also came down with the longest, ever-lasting illness. The toddlers had colds and fevers and were miserable, and just when it seemed to go away, it would come back again. I myself ended up with the world’s longest sinus infection-like illness that behaved the same way; I spent a day or two miserable in bed with fevers and face pain, would feel good again for another day or two, and then it would start all over. It didn’t help my immunity that during this time I was starting to pick up night shift, which meant very little sleep with a 2 hour one way commute and a toddler not sleeping at night. Because of this month long illness and me having to call into work for fevers on several ocassions, I lost my job around New Years Eve.
Chad also lost his job right before Christmas when he went to put in his two week notice. It is mind blowing to me that companies do this; they fire good (no…great) employees after giving the proper notice of finding a new job. So here we sat for two weeks with zero income and a brand new house where multiple things were going wrong already. He has not started his new job working for a fire systems company that installs sprinklers in buildings. It’s a lot of boring grunt work with bad hours and a one hour commute each way. Needless to say, we are all feeling the stress still. I wish I could say moving into our new house brought a sigh of relief, but unfortunately it has not. We are still taking life day by day, paycheck by paycheck, and having to put all our homesteading dreams on hold while we just survive.
So that’s most of 2022 in a nutshell. I’m really hoping in a few years we look back on that year as a challenge in our relationship and emotional growth, because right now at this moment, 2022 seems like a curse that won’t stop.