Our family moved from our small farmstead in central Vermont back to midcoast Maine on March 31. We now live just a 12 minute drive from our daughter, son-in-law and 19 month old grandson and about 20 minutes from where we lived in Maine 6 1/2 years ago (albeit for only 2 1/2 years).
This was a very hard move for me. I was dearly attached to our home in the rural town of Vershire, Vermont. The house was built in 1839 and the property was very beautiful having a stream as the back border, an acre of fenced in pasture/yard, and a perfectly flat meadow that we converted to our market garden. Oh, and the “sugarshack” - this we converted to a farmstand, a place to set up food for gatherings, and a small private guest room complete with a woodstove. We had spent 6 seasons lovingly cultivating the property - building a greenhouse, improving the soil each season, adding perennials and more. The even harder part about moving was leaving dear friends. Never in my adult life had I had such strong friendships. These are wonderful authentic people that formed a small community when covid hit and our home was the meeting spot for regular potlucks. Because our house was along a main room, we also had friends stopping by frequently to drop off a plant, say hello, ask if our daughter might want to join them on an outing. These are individuals that I trust, love, and admire for their strength, wisdom, courage, and thoughtfulness.
Back to our move….
With the housing market seemingly nearing a peak in central Vermont we realized that we could probably sell our house and buy a fixer upper for cash near our daughter in Maine as well as pay off our debt and spend 6 months fixing up the house. We decided to put the house on the market in February because we wanted to take advantage of having as much nice weather as possible to spend fixing up the house we would buy. Within 5 days, we had an offer on our house for even a bit more than we were asking. Our next job was to see what we could find in Maine. This is when the sadness began to really creep in for myself. It became clear that to find a house for the price we needed to follow through on our plans, the house would not be very nice at all and it may be impossible to find something with land as well, and be with a 15 minute drive to two towns for each of our children’s needs. Later I would learn that being just a 12 minute drive to Belfast would fill one of my own needs.
Mike and I made 3 trips out (a five hour drive each way) and after our 3rd trip, we were very discouraged. The next day I noticed that one of the houses we had looked at had been reduced $50,000. This put things in a new perspective and although we had only seen the house for 10 minutes (which I, at the time, had 100% disqualified), we put an offer on it. We had some slight back and forth, but we got the sellers to agree to $150,000 which was our goal. So we were going from 3 beautiful acres, a house perfect for hosting (which is one of my gifts), a market garden, etc.. to a very ugly house whose updates were all cheap and from at least the 1980s, just 1 acre (with some of that being a slope to a brook);no suitable barn or fencing (although we did make an out building work temporarily for the animals), very close to the road (yes, the traffic is loud), and really a house with absolutely no character.
My mental health suffered a bit in those interim weeks between being under contract and moving. Every ounce of my body kept hoping it would fall through. Our buyers asked for yet another inspection, for example, and I would think to myself “maybe this will be it”. Yet each time the buyers still wanted it. I would remind myself that God has a plan for all of this and tell myself to practice gratitude and remember all the positive reasons for moving. The day of the move was long and hard but we had good friends helping us. I still remember the raw feeling of that day - still mourning over all that we had left as we moved most our items into the garage as they would need to stay there while we fixed up the house. Every ounce of energy nearly drained as I helped to pull up carpet in the bedrooms so we could at least get mattresses down to sleep on that first night. (Thankfully the bedrooms had carpet that was easily removed with hardwood floors underneath. Not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely passable. This was in sharp contrast to the very hard job of removing two layers of dirty carpet in the living room with a layer of black glue that had to be scraped.)
I will share more of my own personal challenges as well as accomplishments in the coming posts.
