With the exception of some life-threatening medical condition, there is nothing in life more stressful, disrupting, aggravating and painful as moving. If it were the reduced to the simple task of putting on your jacket, hoping in the car, driving to your new home and starting anew, it would be less stressful than speaking with “Roger” on the tech support line of your cable company. And to be completely honest, the mortgage was the easy part. Getting the pre-approval, getting the approval and then signing the papers was the piece-of-cake part of the whole ordeal.

In the beginning of 2021, my wife and I made the decision that with the housing market being what it was, it would be in our best interest to sell, take our profits and get the hell out of New Jersey while the getting was good. That being said, I have had a year of fix this, fix that, paint this, paint that, make this and that look new(er) and search for a new home. With that, came the foregoing of things that I prefer to do like cycling, motorcycling, gaming, keeping my YouTube channel up and writing this and other blogs. While the house didn’t need a lot of work, it was time consuming work and chores that had to be done. Not to mention the pre-packing and sorting of things I no longer needed or had room for.

We had made the decision that North Carolina would be where we would go and the ensuing hours on Zillow and Realtor.com would have us reeling for months as we looked at homes in our preferred area but were unable to do anything about because our house wasn’t even on the market yet. We made the decision that we would go to North Carolina the second week in September 2021 and look for out new home. We decided we would drive to save some money so we wouldn’t have to rent a car and we would spend 4 days there and we’d find a home.

We did.

My wife had made contact with a real estate agent prior to our arrival in NC and Stephanie was kind enough to show us around our desired area. We came close on a couple of homes and I was nearly set on a beautiful home overlooking a river, but thankfully, we kept looking. While in NC, we made it a plan to meet some friends who were in the Myrtle Beach area while we were there. So on that day, I dropped my wife off at her friends and I departed to meet my friends. When we regrouped later that day, we decided to stop on the way back to our hotel and look at some homes that we had found attractive to our needs. One of the homes checked all the boxes and we fell in love with it. We called our agent and made an offer, contingent on us selling our house in NJ.

We then decided that upon our return to New Jersey we would contact the agent we’ve been working with and list our house. Confident that all that needed to be done, repaired, painted and made to look pretty was done. It was time to stage the house for selling. When we got back to Jersey, that is exactly what we did.

Then the bomb dropped.

(Tune in to Part 2 coming soon)