Our Move to South Carolina: the Announcement and Pursuing a Move

In April we were busy living our lives in Michigan! The weather wasn't very great but one weekend between snow and rain and more snow there was nice weather and Kevin built three additional raised beds for our garden, and got the soil for them. We were living as if our roots were settled.

On April 29th, a Friday, Kevin came home from work as usual and motioned me to the bedroom to talk. I thought he had an outing in mind but wanted to check with me before bringing it up in front of our daughter. Little did I know!

Instead of plans for the weekend he told me that his boss was shutting down his business. The business that his boss had built from the ground up, that was going well from our perspective, that had provided a steady income for our family for the past three years - closed. In a month. (In fact, everything ended up being wrapped up in two weeks after that announcement.)

After questioning Kevin (closed? as in: no more? what? why? ), I slowly said, "Maybe this means we can move to South Carolina now." My heart that I'd been carefully guarding against discontentment, now exploded with hope in the possibility of moving. And Kevin, instead of saying we were fine where we were, looked at me and agreed that it was indeed a possibility.

On Saturday, Kevin updated his resume and sent it to a company in South Carolina that was advertising a position he was interested in. He had me read it over, and the only comment I had was that perhaps he should remove our cell phone from the resume, because we don't really use our cell phone. He did decide to leave the number on, and sent it off. Not twenty minutes later, the cell phone was ringing. I just looked at Kevin in disbelief. And it was the company that he had just sent his resume to.

While the company had been quick to call and schedule an initial phone interview, after that it felt like they moved very slowly. In retrospect it wasn't that slow - but at the time it felt like all we were doing was w-a-i-t-i-n-g. 

In the meantime we started doing things like talking with a realtor, and as we got nearer to knowing for sure about the job, Kevin did something totally crazy: he sold our snow blower!

And then, finally, the company got everything squared away and gave Kevin an official offer letter. After that it was GO time! We had a lot to do to wrap up our Michigan lives: stage and sell our house, declutter as much as possible, and get a place to live in South Carolina.

Tomorrow: Staging and Selling our House