Immersing oneself in a dream is lovely, but to walk in reality means that there is an awful lot of just plain hard work that has to happen. We certainly didn’t have the money to fund our dream. A family of five with a single income in this day and age is not a proposition for great wealth. We were, as most of our peergroup is, in debt and slowly sinking. Our house was 100 years old, with all the quirks and issues that go along with it. It was drafty, and the cost of furnace oil just kept climbing. It was beginning to need repairs that were beyond our reach. We wanted to sell it, in order to find land and pursue the life of our choice, but how do you sell a house that has a bathroom floor rotting through?

You pull up your big-girl pants and strap on your toolbelt, that’s how. I’m not a carpenter, plumber, or contractor, but I know how to work. While my husband worked, I ripped up cracked linoleum, tore out the old, water damaged, presswood vanity and bent toilet roll holder. We wrestled the old toilet out onto the deck and had a plumber in to disconnect and cap off the pipes. Then mom and I ripped up the floor and tore down the wallboard.

For months, an hour here, a couple hours there, while my children played in the next room, I rebuilt the room from the studs up. Challenges would pop up and have to be dealt with. With a tiny budget. With not all the proper tools. With rudimentary building skills. But between mom and I, we got it done, finally.

Then the big bathroom. New toilet, new flooring, new wallboard. New flooring in the kitchen (remnant I had had waiting for 8 years) and dining room (which I got for free from a place that was being torn down. I just had to tear it up myself and transport it). Paint in the bathrooms and hallways. Old sheets found new life as curtains. Six months of hard, sweaty, filthy work. But finally we were ready. We took a deep breath, signed the papers, and launched our home into the sizzling-hot housing market. A friend listed hers at approximately the same time. Hers sold in 3 days. Ours hit the market and did absolutely nothing for 3 months. Nada. Only 6 showings in that whole time. Zero interest.

I have to admit, we were baffled. We had been so sure that THIS was the right time. What went wrong? Were we lacking faith? Were we being tested? Had we simply misread the timing?

Keeping a house showing-level clean with 3 small children, 3 cats and a giant slobbery dog is a challenge at the best of times. After three months of it, we were all exhausted. We pulled the house off the market to lick our wounds and regroup. In December of last year, we switched agencies, took advantage of holiday pricing (hey, $500 off is nothing to sneeze at in today’s economy), and once again launched our house into the public eye. Being as the market is generally slow in the winter, we expected to sell sometime in the spring and make our leisurely transition to the new place.

We sold in six days.

And then a week after we sold, we found out that the friends who had originally sparked the idea — the ones near whom we planned to build — were moving. Out of the country. Now we needed a Plan B. We didnt have a Plan B

To say we were caught flat-footed is an extreme understatement. When we told my family we had sold our house the first question was always “Where are you going?” To which the only answer we had was “I don’t know”. By closing date, that answer hadnt changed. We still had nowhere to go TO, and being as it was winter, we couldn’t really go looking for land until the snow melted, either. Like Abraham in the modern day, we were stepping out, in faith, waiting for Father to show us where to go. In the short term, we packed all our belongings into a box truck and moved into mom’s guest room for what we hoped would be a month or less.