About a year and a half ago Keith and I toured our friend’s tiny house and a small idea was sparked. Couldn’t we sell our home and build a small house with no mortgage? Could we REALLY? We started thinking of what we could eliminate by not living in the 32034 zip code as well. No city water bill? (Ours was $200-$300 a month!) Lower taxes? What could we do with no mortgage and less payments? Is 1000 sq feet too small? (Keith wants to go smaller!) Will we regret this? Can we just make the house tiny and have a great outdoor space for entertaining? We knew we had equity in our home and Amelia Island is growing so quickly. We knew homes were selling very quickly and wanted to put ours on the market before our neighborhood started its next expansion phase.
The “American Dream” isn’t our dream. We want to travel and didn’t like being tied to that mortgage. We felt like it was holding us back from so many things. Surrounded by all the stuff we thought we needed I just felt overwhelmed. I never wanted to go through or put that stuff away. I wasn’t any more content having things than I was without those things. That house became a pain when Keith started traveling for work and wanted to spend time with friends and family on the weekends instead of doing home maintenance. We made one of the best decisions ever when we hired Paige to come in and clean our house and with a smaller home there will be less to clean and less to maintain. If we weren’t sinking money into a mortgage we’d have extra to outsource all the other things we hated too! Mowing grass, washing windows… Living mortgage free would free up a large amount of money to outsource those things.
After talking about it for what seemed like forever we finally got serious and put our house on the market.
With the help of our amazing realtor, Jackie Darby, our home was under contract in less than a week. Thank you, JESUS! If it had taken any longer than a week I would have died because every morning I had to MAKE MY BED and have the house in tip-top shape and ready for showings. I’m not the kind of girl who makes her bed every day. Or even once a year! We walked away with enough money to build a small home which is exactly what we were hoping for.
Next came the process of moving out. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you can accumulate in one year. We took 30 + bags of clothing, toys and household items to goodwill. We only kept the stuff we really loved (mostly just my seashell collection) and packed it away in a storage unit. It took every bit of the 60 days we had until closing to dig ourselves out of all the stuff in our house. One of our goals with the house we want to build is to keep the “stuff” to a minimum!
This week we took the step of calling the builder. He’s so busy that he cannot even meet with us until June, but he asked me to put together an inspiration board to send to him. Ideally I would like 1000 sq foot home with 2 small bedrooms and 2 baths. We want an open kitchen and living room with vaulted ceilings. Over the bedrooms we want an open loft. I realize I’m asking for a lot for such a small home, but we are flexible and our hearts won’t be broken if we can’t have it all.
I’m planning to blog throughout the building process because so many people ask us about what our plans are and this will be an easy way for everyone to follow along!
Here’s the inspo board for what I’m calling “The Brock’s Bungalow!” All images were taken from Pinterest.
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That is too cool