Sold! (well, almost. . . )

Our big news this week is that we have almost sold our house in NJ.

If all goes well, the buyers will have their mortgage soon and the house will join the list of "stuff" that we sold.  Cars, boats, and surfboards have already found new homes.  Now our home will be someone's new home, too.

Tom and I spent the weekend cleaning out the house.  It was pretty much four days of packing boxes followed by trips to storage, trips to goodwill, trips to the dump.  Deciding what we "needed" when we haven't really used it in a year and a half.  Most of the clothes that were left went to goodwill, some furniture we no longer wanted (remember the kid's dining table we bought at ikea when I moved to Philly to use as a coffee table, Mom?) to a neighbor, and the food to the first person who wanted it.  I left Tom to clean out the shed and the yard, and he will have to sleep on the floor until Friday.  It was a busy weekend but well worth the effort.

Selling the house gives us a degree of freedom that we haven't had since we moved here.  We still don't know where our next move will take us, or even when, but now we have the ability to actually make that decision, rather than going back to our house in NJ.

Don't get me wrong, if the deal falls through and we still have a house in NJ, I would be fine with moving back to it.  It would be easy in so many ways--with dozens of school districts, I could find work, we both have friends there, I would have the gym and Tom would have surfing again, and we know how to get to Target with our eyes closed.

The thing about selling the house is now, if we want to go back to NJ, we can make that a conscious decision.  And if we want to move somewhere, anywhere, else, we can make that decision too.  If we have a house in NJ, we simply wouldn't be able to afford to move somewhere else.  Without the house to tie us down, we really can make our next move when and where we are ready.

So we're hoping that the buyer gets a mortgage and we actually close the deal.  Ideally before we make too many more mortgage payments. . .