I feel silly and a little embarrassed every time I tell someone we bought a house 3 hours away from our big city lives and our big city jobs.
The first thing most people wonder is if this is some type of business venture. Are we planning to rent it out? No, I have to admit, it’s just a weekend place. But we’re not really the type of people who should own a “weekend place.” We’re just two millennials who’ve clawed our way into careers we enjoy, but really we’re “comfortable” at best. We don’t even own a house in the city where we live and work. So you can see why we had some well-meaning family members who advised us against buying this property.
But then I remember, we already tried the conventional route — and we hated it. Since then we’ve tried just about everything else. So how’d we get here? Well… storytime.
Once upon a time, we did the whole two-story-house-in-the-suburbs thing. We had just gotten married and were both working 9-to-5 office jobs with 401Ks, yearly reviews, and dress codes (yes, this was pre-Covid). So we bought a cute little house within easy driving distance from both our jobs, and we were convinced we were going to start a family in it. But when I tell you… the ink had barely dried on the closing docs before we wanted to get out. And for no good reason! It was nice. The house was nice. The neighborhood was nice. The schools were nice. Everything was nice. And we hated it.
My husband has a casual affinity for the French language, and the summer after we bought our house I started teaching myself French too. We did that until we gradually got more and more serious about it. One day we found ourselves looking for classes in our area, and I told him: “If we’re going to put all this time and effort, and now money, into learning French, I want the possibility of actually moving to France to at least be on the table.” And from then on we had it in our heads that we were moving to France. We spent our evenings drinking wine and throwing resumes into every inbox we could find, and within a few weeks my husband actually started getting some bites. After a couple opportunities fell through — as they do — he got an offer from an American company with a branch in the French Alps. We couldn’t believe it!
We sold our house. We sold our cars. We sold our furniture. We got rid of everything except what we could cram into a corner of my husband’s sister’s attic. We packed two suitcases each and flew to France just in time for the most magical Christmas in the French Alps you can imagine. After a couple months of meeting people and getting to know our new city, we came back to the States to apply for visas — aaaaand that’s when Covid hit the US and suddenly shut everything down.
Instead of just finding a short lease and hunkering down for a few months, we decided to take advantage of our homelessness and travel. We didn’t have a lot of money, and I didn’t have a job at the time, so we bought a popup camper and spent the next 4 months chasing beautiful weather all over the United States.
But by summer of 2020 we realized Covid wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and likewise we weren’t going back to France anytime soon, so we upgraded the popup camper for a bigger rig. We eventually made our way back to Texas (and warmer weather) for the holidays, and then I got pregnant with our son. All the doctor’s visits made it tough to travel during the pregnancy, so we mostly stayed put after that. And around that time, we finally decided to abandon our dream of moving to France altogether.
We were still living in the RV when our little boy was born, but then shortly after that I got a job opportunity downtown, so what’d we do? Obviously we took our newborn and moved into a loft apartment downtown within easy walking distance of my new job — a setup that allowed me to work full-time but also go home for lunch every day to nurse.
We started saving for a down payment on a house and were looking at houses in our area, but we were starting to get that same stir-crazy feeling we’d gotten when we bought our house before. I kept obsessing over what was wrong with our last house? And why did we hate it so much? And how could we avoid doing that again?
Around that time we took some RV trips to the lake where my husband’s family used to own a lake house. They sold it just a few months before we met, so I never got to visit, but it was a huge part of my husband’s childhood and family life. He showed me around the lake, and we noticed some of the houses that were for sale. Not the big ones. Just the small ones…
We started talking, and then we started looking at the different lakes around us. We visited a couple places but nothing spoke to us until we found this house. And really, the house itself isn’t what spoke to us, so much as the property. The lot was beautiful, tucked into an inlet and hidden from the road by trees and brush. But the house hadn’t been lived in for 20+ years.
Let’s just say there were no bidding wars for this little monster.
But there was something about it that spoke to us — and at the time, that was enough. The rest of the story, though, is a whooole other story.
avantgardener 