In case you missed our announcement, we moved to The Bahamas this summer! Some of you have messaged me on instagram asking what exactly made us want to spend the Summer away and the answer is a little complicated… so I thought a blog post would best suit this explanation!
The Story of How We Moved
You may or may not know that we sold our house in Austin this Spring due to a crazy hot market that we wanted to take advantage of. We listed it much higher than we bought it for and ended up getting 5 offers over asking!! It was absolutely insane but that was exactly why we wanted to sell. We knew that selling would be a really awesome financial move for our future. After we accepted the buyers offer, we were on the hunt for a new place and we looked a tons of homes. Homes to buy, homes to rent, homes in and around Austin! We really couldn’t find anything we wanted and, in general, homes were hard to come by. The bidding wars in the Austin area were absolutely nuts and we knew that if we wanted to buy another home in the same area that we were going to have to purchase way higher than what we wanted to. We joked about just dropping everything and spending the summer in The Bahamas since we were about to be homeless anyways!
After weeks of searching and still nowhere to go, we decided to look into 2 bedroom apartments. The kids would have to share a room, and Blake and I both were going to lose our at-home office space. I met up with Blake one day after work and we toured an apartment right near our home that we were selling. It was a brand new complex and decently cute, so we had decided that we would just get through a year of renting there instead of trying to find a house. So many factors were at play during this decision. Aria is starting kindergarten in the Fall and we needed to be in the right place for that. We had already gotten her all set up at a school in Georgetown near our home so we concluded that the apartment would work for the time being. We took home the paperwork on a Thursday night and started to fill it out.
I was still uneasy about this “final” decision. It didn’t feel right and I was extremely stressed and exhausted. So many things were happening in Austin, and I was starting to feel like maybe it wasn’t the right place for us anymore. Thankfully, Blake and I have the ability to work remote so other than finding a good school for Aria we didn’t feel completely tied down to one specific area. Over the weekend we prepped the apartment’s application forms and paid our app fees, but the thought of spending the summer in the Bahamas was something that I kept going back to. I truly felt INSANE for thinking so far into the idea. I mentioned it to Blake again as we were packing up our house to move out, and convinced him that we could do it! We just needed to iron out all the details, like where we would stay and if we really would be able to work remotely. We were able to get in touch with a vacation rental company that my dad knew in Eleuthera and since we were renting for such an extended time period, we negotiated the rates down on a cute cottage near Governor’s Harbour!
This was all planned and prepped in a matter of TWO DAYS you guys… and when I tell y’all that we felt crazy, I mean it. Blake and I just kept looking at each other smiling and shaking our heads, haha. I told Blake (and myself) that this was going to be an adventure, and a summer that we never forget because really, who gets to just move to another country for an entire summer?! Our kids will be older soon and they will be busy during the summers with dance recitals, sports, camps, etc. and we won’t have another chance to do this for a very long time. Not for this long, at least. Oh, and if you thought the story was over… there’s more! HA!
Finding our New Home
Once we finalized all of our Bahamas plans, we had a friend get in touch with us about a home in the hill country (hour from Austin or so) and said he had a house that he thought we should look at. I had VERY low expectations tbh but we decided to go look because it was in a really lovely small town, one of the best neighborhoods and was a decently newer house. Well, my expectations were met and the house was a wreck. I was not a fan and neither was Blake. It was very small and needed so much work done to it so we told our friend, “thanks but no thanks” but then again everything happens for a reason right? If we hadn’t gone to look at that home that I had very low expectations for, we wouldn’t have found out about a home coming on the market that next week that was in that same great neighborhood and within walking distance of the elementary school. From the outside, the home looked nice and our realtor told us it was only a couple of years old. I didn’t think that much of it at the time because we weren’t able to go in and look at it, plus nothing else had worked out so why would this random house, that wasn’t on the market yet, be the one?
The following week Blake and I discussed a time that we might could look at the house but we almost didn’t even try to look at it. We were so busy and tired of the house hunting… but God had other plans for us. We told ourselves (again), “why not?” and got in the car to go take a look. The house was well built and had a beautiful backyard for our kids and animals. This was really one of my top priorities when we were looking for a house. It has a white stone fireplace and it had 4 bedrooms. When we finished looking we drove home and I felt God pulling at my heart strings a bit. There were a lot of things I loved about this home but I didn’t know if we should put in an offer. Blake and I discussed it more and we decided that we could put in an offer and if we didn’t get it, then it wasn’t meant to be… but if we did then that meant we were going to begin our life in a new city and start really planting roots for our kids. Our offer was a little over ask price and it gave the sellers a one month lease back since we were going to be in The Bahamas anyways. The weekend came and went, and very late on a Sunday evening we got a text saying the house was ours! To my surprise, I was SO excited. I truly had no idea I would react the way I did but it just proved to me that this was it for us. This was RIGHT.
Well, if you’re still here reading this, I’m very impressed! This is the story of how we moved to The Bahamas for the summer and how we also ended up finding or next home just in the knick of time! God truly does have incredible plans for your life… you just have to trust him with it. I’m so sad to have moved away from the Austin area because I love that city with all my heart but I think being out of town a bit will be exactly what we all need. We are so excited to be spending the summer on the beautiful island of Eleuthera and we can’t wait to come home and set up our new house right before Aria starts kindergarten!!
As always, thanks for stopping by to read and be sure to follow me on the Liketoknow.it app for exclusive content and products from our Bahamas trip!
