We Sold Our House....WHAAAAT

YUP. Hold tight cuz this post is gonna be a rambler.

It is the end of an era. Almost 14 years of an era. It’s also the beginning of some very exciting new adventures.

The whole thing is completely bizarre. I feel simultaneously thrilled and devastated and it’s a real unsettling dichotomy. I am a person who absolutely thrives at home—that old saying: Bloom where you are planted. That’s me, in a nutshell (Help! I'm in a nutshell! How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell? What kind of shell has a nut like this?…..sorry, I digress). So I know that I will absolutely bloom no matter where I happen to be planted, but the uprooting process is…not my favorite.

Let me back up a bit.

If you’ve been following along with us for a minute, then you know that my husband and I have been renovating our 114 year-old Los Angeles farmhouse since 2008. It has been an absolute labor of love, sweat, blood, and tears. This house has taught us so much, shown us how much we can persevere together, and brought us so goddamned much happiness and life. I knew from the moment I walked into it (in all it’s lovely, abandoned disrepair) that it was destiny, and that this house and us—we would change each other. But Jonathon and I also knew, without a doubt, that this would not be our “forever” home (TBH, I’m not sure I subscribe to that concept anyways). In fact, we only intended to stay for maybe 4 or 5 years. But we loved it. So we stayed longer. We love our neighbors beyond words, we loved the garden, we loved the town, we even loved the bear that would sit under our bedroom window thrice monthly during the summer knocking around our neighbor’s trash cans. This was the house we became chicken owners in and the house we began drinking with them in. Oh gawd, we are going to miss it so much. This house is family.

So why, then, did we decide to sell? Ahhhhhh, that IS the question, isn’t it? The short answer is: we have many, many, many manymanymany reasons. There is no one, single reason—rather a collection of small reasons growing over time as they rolled downhill and gained size and speed until they were a loud screaming mass of reasons that finally outweighed our handful of perfectly good reasons to just stay. Coupled with a very hot selling market. Because we knew from the start that we wouldn’t be staying forever, Jonathon and I had sort of mutually agreed that the smart thing would be to sell the house when the selling was good. And the universe would kind of let us know when the time was right. And that is DEFINITELY the scenario in this current real estate market.

Rest assured, we would not have “sold our house in a hot market” if there weren’t other significant reasons to sell. On a very basic level, the layout of the house and yard never functioned well for us…and if I’m being really honest about who we are and how we live…it didn’t work well for our dogs. YES WE ARE THOSE PEOPLE WHO JUST SOLD OUR HOUSE BECAUSE WE WANT A BETTER LIFE FOR OUR DOGS. Hahahahaha. No but seriously. The sloped lot, tiered yard, and upside-down house layout (meaning, it’s two story but you enter on the top story and go downstairs to the second), made it a bit tricky to juggle the animals. We obviously made it work for nearly 14 years (and to be honest, it absolutely wasn’t terrible at all and the animals weren’t exactly lacking in lifestyle), but it wasn’t what we envisioned as a long term ideal scenario for them or for us. We want both the dogs and the chickens to have more wide-open free-range space, and we really, really want a house that is one story on a flat or fairly flat lot. Also, we’d really like to have a guest house for Gail (my mom) to move into if she should ever decide she wants it—and we just weren’t going to be able to make that happen at that house (trust me, we looked into it multiple times).

Another major issue for us is that the house is on a busy, main street. Thankfully, we never had any animals accidentally escape and get harmed in the road, but my god, it was a constant, simmering concern for us. CONSTANT. An additional drawback to that highly visible spot was that, in the past few years, there has been an increasingly worrisome lack of privacy. While I understand that I sort of put our life out into the public eye with this here blog, etc, I am a person that heavily values privacy. I was extremely careful about keeping our address and the front of our house private (until very recently when we knew we were selling and I finally felt like I could share views of the before and after renovation of the front of the house), but more and more people were finding and photographing and tagging the house on social media and it started to chip away at our feeling of security. Which is a truly awful feeling to have about your home. Also, I realize it could just as easily happen like that at the next house, but we would just like to be a little bit more off the beaten path with the next one.

I’ll end the list of reasons there—I don’t want this post to come off as a list of complaints. It literally kills me to complain about this house. It is such a special, special place, and letting it go was one of the hardest leaps of faith we have ever taken. But such is life, right? It’s hard to believe that there could be another house out there that we could love like this one, or more than this one…but we won’t know if we don’t try. And I know for sure that wherever we land, we will put all the same love and energy and dogs and chickens and cats and who knows what else into it.

So that begs the question: what next? GREAT QUESTION. I wish I could answer that! Lol. I really wish that we were the people that could afford to buy our next house before we sell our current house—BUT WE ARE DEF NOT THOSE PEOPLE. Nor are we the people that want to try to sell and buy at the exact same time. That is waaaaaaaay too much stress. We knew we wanted to sell our house full and clear before trying to buy another. Thankfully for us, we, and alllllllll our animals, are able to crash temporarily at Gail’s house while we take our time searching for our next house in this crazy, crazy market. We are SO unbelievably fortunate and grateful to have this option—to literally be living rent-free and save money while we wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself. It’s kind of freaking wonderful, actually.

Not mad at our temporary view.

If you’ve tagged along with us on Instagram for a bit, you know that we often go up for the weekend to my mom’s house (she lives about an hour east in the local mountains outside of Los Angeles). We would always take our dogs and cats with us when we went up, but leave the chickens at home under the watchful eye of our awesome neighbors who were always willing to do chicken duty for us for a couple of days. Despite how great they were with said chicken duty, I always still worried about the birds when we were gone. I’m a control freak and not being able to check on them with my own eyeballs was unsettling for me (we did also install cameras so that I could peek in on them from afar like a lunatic). I basically could never relax when we left them behind—even if it was only for a couple of days. We always joked that we should just build a coop at my mom’s house and take them back and forth with us. Then, in September of 2020, we got evacuated from our house due to an encroaching wildfire situation and we found ourselves scrambling to move them all up there anyway. We set up a piecemeal enclosed corral for them in my mom’s garage using puppy gates and crates—basically whatever we had on hand because it was a rush job. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. We were there for 2 weeks and it went great, and we realized we should have a better emergency coop set-up at her house in case we ever had to evacuate again. So we got a big ol’ 6x12’ covered dog run. With a few modifications, it makes a pretty nice temporary garage chicken run that we can pop up as needed. And then once we had that, we thought—hey, that makes a great vacation chicken run if we just want to come up for a few days and bring them with us. And we did just that, quite a few times, for the past year and everyone seemed happy and healthy and totally fine with it.

The garage chicken run: it ain’t purdy, but it works! It’s a covered dog run with a tarp wrapped around the bottom to contain the coop debris. We open the garage door for them during the day, and close them up so they are safe and warm at night.

Fast forward to us deciding to sell our house. We knew, based on the times we’d brought the chickens and all the rest of the animals up with us on vacay that we could make living at Gail’s house work. We’d move the chickens temporarily into their garage condo, and if we are still here in the spring when it gets a bit warmer, we’ll build them a more permanent coop and run outside. But for now, there’s snow on the ground and it’s too damned cold for my pampered LA chicks to get thrown out into the winter elements. They are happy and toasty and safe in the garage (and get plenty of fresh air and sunshine when the garage door is open during the day). And yes, the Frog Fountain is absolutely set up in the condo and Corn is getting alllllll the quality fountain time that she needs to thrive.

Corn still rules the Frog Fountain.

No one but Corn is allowed to perch on the Frog Fountain. NO ONE.

So that’s the current situation! We are hunkered down at my mom’s house indefinitely. While we’re here, we’re going to help her with some home improvement projects that need doing (some of which will be an interesting challenge because my mom and I could not be more polar opposite in our decorating tastes) in exchange for free room and board for our entire ridiculous traveling circus. For how long—who knows! But TBH, we aren’t in any huge rush—we’ll know it when we find the right place. What we DO know, is that we are looking for another fixer, on a bigger piece of land (no easy feat in Los Angeles), that is NOT on a busy street. Hehehehe. No more busy streets, mmmmkay, universe?

PS: I never finished sharing all the befores and afters of the farmhouse renovation—so I’ll still have some of those posts coming soon. And hopefully soon there will be a new project house to share!