I have had so many kind people checking in with me about how things are going with my job transition and move to Kansas (if you’re just catching up, check out this post about my new role).
I thought that this week I would offer a little update on where we’re at with our plans to move.
You may remember that during two weeks in November I was traveling to two conferences back-to-back. While that was happening, my partner, Ben, was busy getting our house ready to go on the market. He packed up some of our stuff, arranged for movers to bring everything we could out to our garage, hired house stagers, and worked with our local realtor on all the details to move the process forward.
We listed our house for sale on Monday, December 2, and we were fortunate to get three offers in the first few days that it was on the market. We did pack up 80% of our stuff to have the house professionally staged, and I’m sure that helped. We had great photos online, and we live in a hot market, but we were still surprised at how quickly things moved.
On the morning of Thursday, December 4, Ben and I accepted an offer on our house while we were at the airport waiting to board separate planes. I was headed off to San Diego to keynote on radical self-trust for the very first time and he was off to Kansas to do some house hunting. We were both amazed at how easy it was to accept the offer via Docusign (such a difference in process from when we bought our house four years ago!).
To help prepare Ben to house hunt on his own, we narrowed down our top choices on Zillow and had long discussions of what our priorities were. For example, we both wanted to have our own office spaces (we have that in our current house), and we wanted space for a guest room in case our families want to visit us. Our current house is about 1,200 sq ft, so we were also looking for something a little bigger with some more storage space.
The night before we left for our respective trips, we went over our main criteria one more time so that Ben felt confident that he could represent what I wanted without me there (for example, I really wanted a lighter kitchen like the one we just created in our remodel, so he ended up saying no to a lot of houses with dark cabinets in their kitchens!). We also discussed several different financial scenarios based on the pricing options we were seeing online and we agreed on the range of what we were willing to offer.
Then, on Friday, December 5, while I was leading a workshop on meaningful productivity in San Diego, Ben looked at 8 houses in the Manhattan area. We had engaged a realtor a couple weeks ago to help us look and he drove around with Ben to look at the different properties and explain various local contexts of neighborhoods, special taxes, what areas were consistently selling well, etc. By the end of the day, Ben had chosen a house, I had agreed, and we made an offer that afternoon.
It was accepted the same day.
So, within one week, we got an offer on our house in Oregon and made an offer on a house in Kansas and both are moving forward.
Yes, we know just how lucky we are.
We’re both pretty excited about the new house in Kansas. It’s a new build with five bedrooms that’s just over 3,000 sq ft. You can get a lot of house for your money in Kansas — it’s actually one of the things that attracted me to the area. The kitchen cabinets of the house were actually being installed the day that Ben walked through and they are white! We were also able to choose our countertops and tile, as well as request a gas range instead of electric. We’ve been assured that our house will be ready by the time that we get there.
We’ll close on the Kansas house, in person, on January 10, 2020.
As you can imagine, selling our house and having somewhere to live in Kansas are two massive items that were on our to-do list. Being able to check them off feels really good.
Up next:
- securing movers for the dates we need to get our stuff from here to there
- completing the inspection on our house to finalize the sales agreement
- returning all the furniture and art used to stage our house
- sending a bunch of paperwork to the Kansas bank where we’re securing our mortgage loan
It’s been such a whirlwind, but I’m so, so, so grateful that things are working out so far. Moving and transitioning jobs can be a pretty stressful thing on its own, so having a lot of these details come together is something I’m especially thankful for.
(I’m offering move updates over on my Instagram Stories, so hop on over there if you want all the latest updates!)