Our Come Back Song

In the infamous words of Darius Rucker, this is our “bad, come back song”.  I know.  We’ve been MIA here on the good ol’ blog in the worst way and we’re sorry…kind of…but kind of not because we’ve been through alot!  In a good way.

So what have we been up to?  The reader’s digest version: gutted our kitchen, remodeled it in less than three months, found my dream job in Vermont, sold our house in four days, and moved 7 hours away to be closer to Colby’s family in Vermont.  We are officially no longer Maine-ers and now reside in the Green Mountain state of Vermont.  Don’t let him fool you, Goose approves:

I have tons to share with you including all the house projects and FINISHED rooms in our old house, some packing and moving tips, house shopping tips (more like what not to do…Colby and I are horrible house shoppers but more on that later…fingers crossed the big ol’ farmhouse we’re trying to buy works out).

But before we get to that, today we’re sharing our back story with you.  Shameless intermission for some kitchen eye candy of our FINISHED kitchen!  Did I mention we finished it?!?!

Moving from Maine to Vermont came out of the blue.  Let’s circle back to the end of 2013.  I had quit my day job and was running our Etsy shop full time.  That lasted, oh, about two months before I decided self-employment was not for me.

I did a brief stint working part-time for a home performance company before landing a full-time job as a small business consultant.  It was a good job, but not what I really wanted to do.

I’ve dreamt for a long time of being a marketing director at a college or university.  I started my career back in the day working in marketing for the University of Maine athletic department and loved it.  I wanted back.

Marketing is my thing and there’s something about the higher education community that speaks to me.  So I spent the spring/summer of 2014 searching for a higher-ed marketing job in Maine.  Sadly, there was nothing but entry-level jobs available.

Colby and I had always talked about moving “someday”.  Moving either 3 hours north to Aroostook County, Maine to be near my family or relocating the 7-ish hours to Vermont to be near his family.  Neither of us had family in the area we were living in and we realized we missed having family close by.

After a frustrating day of job hunting in July, I expanded my job search just a smidge, to Vermont.  Lo and behold there was my dream job!  I applied, even though the application deadline had passed.  You never know.

Along came September and I still hadn’t heard back about the job, but I did find two other dream jobs all within a 30-minute radius of about 90% of Colby’s family in Vermont.  Perfect locations.  I applied for both, weeks passed and I heard nothing from the employers.

Somewhere around this point, we were getting ready to gut our kitchen and start a kitchen remodel for our winter project.  We figured we weren’t about to put house projects on hold, sit around, and wait on these jobs so we powered through and started our kitchen remodel.

If we were meant to move to Vermont, one of the jobs would come through.  Mid-October rolled around, our kitchen looked kind of like this:

We had just pulled all the kitchen remodel permits with our town and naturally, that’s when I got the call.  Or more like three.  All three dream marketing jobs in Vermont wanted to interview me.  All in the same week.

WTF?!  How does that happen?  Why did it happen right after we made the biggest mess in the world in our kitchen?!  Don’t let the picture above fool you, it got way worse than that.  I just don’t have photos to prove it.

Fast forward a few weeks and by early November I had put in my notice at my job in Maine and set up a temporary place to live in Vermont (with Colby’s cousins).  Colby and I both went to Thanksgiving in Vermont where we made our “we’re moving” announcement to the family (which I think they were all thrilled about…pretty sure about that…otherwise they’re hiding it really well).

At the end of the weekend, I stayed in VT while Colby headed back to Maine.  We knew we had a ton of work to get the house ready to hit the market.  The plan was for Colby to continue working his job in Maine until we finished the house and put it on the market, then he would move to Vermont to be with me and job hunt.

We thought it was best to keep our plans hush-hush in case his employer caught wind of it and decided to replace him before we were ready.

It took us about three months to finish our kitchen remodel and get the whole house ready for sale.  There were a few other projects that we needed to tackle on the house.  Like finishing our bedroom closet and laying down wide pine floorboards in the rest of the house.  Shameless sneak peek of the living room with fresh flooring:

So for three months, I lived away from Colby driving about 6-7 hours each weekend (one way mind you) to help him work on the house before making the drive back.  I’m sick of driving…so so so sick of driving.

But we got it done, found a fabulous real estate agent in the Bangor, Maine market and after listing our house, it was under contract in 4 days.  We closed on the house a few weeks ago and are back together again.  It’s so funny learning how to live with Colby again but way nicer than weird.

In the two weeks that we’ve been in Vermont together, Colby finished up his job with his current company and landed a fabulous new job WAY too easily. I’m actually kind of mad at him because he applied for one job…one…and got it.

We temporarily moved into his grandmother’s apartment and are officially under contract on our dream country house at a steal of a price.  Everything has been working out all too easily for us which makes me think that this house selling/job switching/move to Vermont plan really was the right thing to do.

So now that we’re settled, I’ll be sharing with you all the eye candy and projects from our old house and hopefully, HOPEFULLY, we’ll have a fabulous new fixer-upper to share.  Inspections are on Wednesday, wish us luck!  Until next time.

Pssst…Do you want to know something ironic?  I’m sitting in a cafe in Vermont writing up this post, and the “our house is a very very very fine house” song is on the radio.  I’m tearing up.  #nojoke #imissouroldhousealready