A New Thing

You might have heard by now, but Alicia and I are moving to Seattle, Washington to begin a life there. I’ll be working for a modern residential firm, and so far it seems like my dream job. The opportunity popped up out of the blue and we decided that we should take this chance to try something new while we still have the freedom to do that. Neither of us have ever spent any time in Seattle, but we’ve found an apartment and are in the process of selling our house and almost all the things in it so we can go start over on the west coast.

We’re both excited to take this chance and sad to leave Charlotte. I try not to regret anything, but there is a large part of the past couple years I wish would have turned out differently. We bought our house and hoped to start a family there; to build a future. That never happened, and to be honest with you leaving everything behind feels like a little bit of a surrender. I don’t think I’ll look back in a few years and think “We never should have left Charlotte,” but leaving the house without a child after only living there a year and a half wasn’t how it was supposed to go. It’s possible that we’ll have kids in Seattle, although at this point I’m so discouraged and don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but the plan was to have children in this house. It’s tough for a plan like that to not work out.

I don’t mean to make it all sound bad. Alicia and I both are excited about Seattle and the neighborhood we’ll be living in. It’s a place where I can walk to work and we can walk everywhere else we need to go; it’ll be nice feeling like city folk for a while. We’ll be living in a new apartment building with water views and we’re looking forward to traveling around the Pacific Northwest and seeing a new kind of nature. I’m also beyond thrilled about this job opportunity; I can’t wait to start. We’ll be leaving Charlotte right after Christmas and drive across the northern part of the country; I’m looking forward to seeing new states. We both feel like this is definitely the right move for us.

My dad’s dad was one of those people who was always fixing things; he would so much rather have fixed something himself than called a professional to do it. I somehow ended up with that gene too. When we bought our house there was a fair amount of work to do, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that Alicia and I renovated every room in the house and did it all ourselves. Out of everything we did we only had to call someone twice: once to fix the heater and once to have an electrician fix a problem that I didn’t know how to fix because the previous owners had wired it backwards. Everything else we did ourselves. We put so much effort and love into this house, and we’re selling it to friends who we think will enjoy it as much as we did. We’re also able to use the profit we’re making to pay off debt and start a savings.

We may not have built the kind of future we thought we would here, but I know we built something good. Now we’ll go build something good in a new place.