To say the last few months have been a wild ride would be a vast understatement. Between selling my house in Maryland, buying a new house in the Charleston suburb of Summerville, working away from family in Charleston, and dealing with packing and all of the other daily struggles of life, it has been one hell of an adventure(If you want to call it that). To say the ups and downs through it all made things hard would be a serious understatement. Regardless of everything that has happened between now and then, Moving to Charleston has been well worth everything that has happened.

So, I originally wanted to catalog the entire moving process, but alas, that just ended up being to stressful and taking up way to much of my time… Shocker, I know. At this point, I figure somewhere out there, there’s someone in a similar situation trying to sell their house, uproot their entire family, and move to somewhere new and far away from what they’re comfortable with. To you, I say hello, good luck, and hang on for one hell of a wild ride.

Where it all began

I guess I’ll start from the beginning; A couple of years ago when my wife and I (then girlfriend) started traveling down to Charleston, South Carolina, We decided that we liked the area. After a couple of visits, we came to the conclusion that wanted to move there. At the time, we knew the move was still a couple of years out, I mean, we weren’t married yet, let alone engaged, so into the back of our minds it went. After proposing, getting married, and having kids, we decided to start toying with the idea of moving again. We had continued to visit the area, so we knew we still liked the area and wanted to end up there, so eventually we started putting some serious thought into it all. Eventually, everything started to fall into place; I was offered a job, and just like that, the moving process began.

The process of selling our house.

After accepting the new job in Charleston, I began traveling back and forth for just under six months, from early April to Late September. During this time was when we had to put our house on the market, and with me regularly out of town, a lot of pressure was put on my wife, and when I was home, it was game time(Or crunch time?), and I had to get as much done as possible. Soon enough, the house was ready and it was placed on the market. Within the first two weeks, we had between 5 and 6 house viewings. For those uninitiated, that’s where strangers come in and walk through your house while you’re still living there. For us, having two kids, work, etc, this was a complex and annoying, yet unavoidable, part of selling a home, so be forewarned.

Our First Offer

It only took us about two weeks before we got the first offer on our house. It wasn’t a good offer, so we countered and they accepted, which effectively went from us losing money on the house to walking away at the break-even point. With that said, we had already performed an inspection on the house, so we know what was wrong, needed to be fixed, and what didn’t, so when these buyers asked us to put a new roof on the house, replace the entire septic system, and numerous other fixes, we were dumbfounded and politely declined and offered a counter of what we would reasonably replace and fix. Now, keep in mind, we had a full inspection done on the house; All findings came back as Good-To-Go, so the requirements form the buyer were completely unsubstantiated and over the top, let alone, if we followed through with them all, we would have been losing about $20K on the house when everything was said and done. Needless to say, when we countered, the first buyers backed out.

Money out of our pocket for the second buyer

Back on the market our house went with two more weeks of almost daily viewings, and before long we had a second offer! Now these buyers were much more reasonable, offering a much better deal where we would actually make some money on the house, albeit not a lot, so we were happy campers. With these buyers, we agreed to fix a few small problems, specifically getting the house up to code with Fire alarms, deck hangers, etc, and agreed to replace a few rubber boots on the roof, and even replace the lid to the Septic System(The only issue with it) which set us back about $3000. With everything fixed, and only out about $4000, the buyers were happy, and so were we(Still being well into the positive). Come mid September, our stress levels are high, the closing day is coming fast, and we slowly finish packing everything into boxes.

Closing Day from hell

We had scheduled closing and settlement on two adjacent days, the 16th and 17th of September, which in hindsight was possible a mistake.. The day before closing we got a box truck and car trailer and got to packing. The next day(Closing Day), about an hour before closing, we still weren’t done packing everything, and to make matters worse, the car trailer had broken. We ended up getting everything packed an hour after the originally scheduled closing time, leaving the truck, car trailer and cars at the old house, driving to the closing and doing what needed to be done. On the way to closing, I was on the phone with the truck company trying to get a replacement trailer since we would driving all night and couldn’t leave the car, let alone broken trailer there. Thanks to my mom especially, and the in-laws for watching the kids, everything somehow got done in time, and we were done, free and clear of our old house. The next step was to go to the in-laws for a few hours and then start the drive down to Charleston so that we could close on our new house less than 24 hours later.

A long drive

At this point I was driving down to Charleston, an 8 hour drive, in a 26 foot box truck, towing behind it another 16 foot car carrier trailer. Nothing really to share about this other than it was long, quiet and slow, so lets move along.

Moving to Charleston

I think it’s safe to say that at this point that we were officially moving to Charleston. We had sold our house, and technically we were now homeless, that is, until the following day, so the stress hadn’t yet stopped. I was more ready now than ever to get into the new house and start getting back to normal.

The time has come

Finally the time had come where we could close on our new house, so that’s what we did. We closed, hired two movers to help us unpack, and did what we had to do. For the most part, this is where the craziness ends. We now had purchased our second home after selling our first, moved our family from Maryland to South Carolina, and life could finally get back to normal.

A conclusion to the move? Perhaps a happy ending?

I don’t know what you want to call this, a happy ending, a conclusion; Whatever it is, I’m glad to see an end to this unapologetically unorganized mess of a blog post. Moving to Charleston has been years in the making, and after just about a month of home ownership in South Carolina, things are finally getting back to normal… well, our new normal. Most of the boxes are unpacked and the house is almost put together, and with everything coming to a close, I have to say the most stressful part of it all was just dealing with the buyers themselves and their requests/requirements. Waiting for them to give us the Go-Ahead was the make-it or break-it of the whole home sale, and once they accepted, it was a huge weight off of our shoulders.

Now that its all over and we’re getting settled in, I’m honestly just excited to get back into a normal routine. I want to be able to spend the time my kids desperately need, just playing with them and spending time with them, without having to choose between them and working on my business or social media and content creation(Obviously I’ve been choosing them whenever I could). With all of that said, this concludes a short story about me moving my to Charleston South Carolina. Hopefully you enjoyed, otherwise, in the spirit of my YouTube video closing, I don’t know why you’re even still reading. Later!