Why We Sold Our House

As our journey has been in full swing for a while, it’s time to lay out how and why we sold our house. Plus, I want to touch on why we decided to live on the road full-time. In fact, most people look at the way we’ve decided to live as a bit nuts, but that’s fine with us. My primary career for the past 22 years has been as a professional jump rope performer so nuts is very comfortable for us. The question is: Where to begin?

Why We Sold Our House

A few years ago we decided that we wanted to sell our townhome. I had bought it before I ever met Alicia and she was never too keen on living in a house without a yard. Our original goal was to buy 10-20 acres and build a dome home (I still think they’re cool). I don’t believe in debt (I’m sure I will be posting about this topic in the future) so we needed to sell our current home to purchase the land and build on it.

We put our house up for sale and thought it would be gone within a few months. We started driving around the country to check out TN and FL as we thought one of those would be ideal to live in. A few months of waiting turned into a year, then 2 years then 3 years. Obviously this wasn’t happening. We pulled the house off the market after deciding that trying to keep it showroom clean wasn’t our strong suit (probably mostly my fault).

One other major reason why we sold our house is that I was hardly ever home! The last year we lived there, I think I was in town a total of 10 days prior to the sale of our house. Definitely not a great reason to keep living in the thing if an opportunity came up to sell. Which happened quite unexpectedly…

In August we had a trip scheduled out to Idaho to do some jump rope shows for 5 days. Our programs were scheduled for each evening so we had the morning and daytime free. We made the awesome decision to get up at 3 AM every morning to go take some sunrise pictures at Yellowstone every day!

Being a landscape photographer means many early mornings. On our first morning at Yellowstone National Park, we hiked down into a gully. During the hike I looked at Alicia and told her that if I was being perfectly honest…this is what I wanted to do on my days off. I knew that if we were to build a house, I would spend all my free time and money doing that. We like to hike. I like to take pictures. I really don’t enjoy sitting around a house. She looked at me and said, “me too”.

The following day we went to the gorgeous Tetons for a sunrise photo and hike. I got some great pictures of these iconic mountains and then we had a nice hike looking for moose and other assorted wildlife.

When we got back to the car I had a voicemail from a realtor.

She said that she had a client who wanted to buy a house in our neighborhood. The client had put an offer on a different house and was outbid by someone. She had noticed that we had our house on the market at one point, but it was not currently active. Were we still interested in selling our house?

I called her back to see if she was serious. To answer that she asked if they could come look at the house at 5 that evening. I was like, “Well, I’m in Wyoming, but sure.” If I were to be brutally honest, we hadn’t left the house in the most show worthy of states. It wasn’t dirty, per-se, but it sure needed to have stuff picked up.

We called some of Alicia’s friends and relatives and asked if they could throw anything they could find in a closet. They did an awesome job of picking stuff up and making the house look reasonable. The following morning, we had an offer. Of course we were out hiking a different trail so we didn’t get that message until a few hours later. Because we took so long to respond, they submitted a better offer. This is how selling a house should be. We left town with no plans on moving. We returned a week later with a contract on our house and no idea what we would do next.

Because I want to get into some of the details on why we chose the particular setup we ended up choosing, I will make a few different posts about what happened next. So if you’re wondering why we sold our house? God laid stuff out so perfectly for us that it would have been hard not to.