This week we’re another step closer to living the full-time RV lifestyle: our beautiful home of 14 years is officially on the market. Talk about another emotional moment! Our house was built for us in 1999-2000 and we moved in 7 months after our wedding. Knowing that we’ll never live there again has us thinking about some of the memories we’ll always have…

Thanks to our two-acre fenced yard, our house was “home base” for the annual Labrador Retriever Rescue volunteers’ training day. We hosted a wedding and reception for Kathie’s cousin on our deck on a beautiful summer day. Many nickels, dimes, and quarters changed hands (and rum was consumed) during poker nights with the AOL crowd. I forgot to open the garage door before backing the SUV out, which netted us some great looking new garage doors. We were the “halfway house” between New Hampshire and points south for our traveling niece and nephews to spend a night. Dozens of our LRR foster dogs left their marks, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. Movie nights in the home theater were always a hit.

A home theater like ours is not an available option in any RV we looked at.

We decided years ago that we wanted to move to a smaller home once the housing market recovered. I’m not sure what made us believe that we could downsize all the way into an RV, but that’s what we’re doing! In fact, we’ve already moved out of our house to make it easier to show to prospective buyers. Until our RV is ready for pick up in April, we’re living in Kathie’s sister Jen’s basement. Moving from our large home to a modest basement has been a great “first step” for us in drastically downsizing our possessions. We’ll need to downsize more to fit in the RV, but we think we’re most of the way there already.

Over the last six months, we gave away most of our possessions to relatives, to goodwill, or through Freecycle. Furniture that’s needed for staging the house has been assigned to relatives, to be collected once the house is sold. The process of shedding 14+ years of accumulated “stuff” was difficult at times, but also refreshing. Now that we’ve been living in Jen’s basement for a month, we find that we don’t really miss anything! We’re very much looking forward to a life where everything we own can be carried around with us. We have a couple of “just in case” items that we are leaving at Jen’s so that if and when we decide to settle down again we can pick them up.

Our next step is to head to Red Bay, Alabama to watch the build of our new, much smaller home!

Good-bye, Great Falls Virginia