I must apologize for being quiet on social media lately, but it’s been quite a year. Nothing bad, but incredibly busy and sometimes stressful. I won’t keep you in suspense. After we came home from Georgia last spring (our first winter as snowbirds), a tree fell on our house during a bad storm. We decided to take it as a sign and put our lovely lakehouse on the market and downsize to a house closer to the city with a smaller yard that requires less upkeep. We’re empty nesters now, and we want to be free to travel year-round and be snowbirds during the long Canadian winters. (I’m currently dreaming about Australia and New Zealand for 2026.) So, the big house seemed like too much responsibility for that kind of lifestyle, and too big and empty for my mom, who lives with us and house sits whenever we’re away.
So, in April, we began to prepare the house for sale, which included getting a new roof (thanks to the fallen tree), getting some of the rooms painted, purging way too much stuff, and finally staging it. All the while, I was obsessively checking real estate websites every day, hunting for the right house for us, which wasn’t easy to find. I was also fighting to stay focused on the new novel I’d just started writing.
Long story short: We finally found a great house in a neighborhood that suited us, close to grocery stores and restaurants, and got into a small bidding war to get it (which happily we won!). But we would be going from 4700 to 2900 square feet, so the purging of our “stuff” reached a whole new level. We made many, many trips to Value Village (our version of Goodwill).
Around the same time, a buyer for our house came along, and the sale finally closed today! We are now settled in our new and cozy little crib just in time for Christmas. It’s very pretty and we all love it, and our daughter Laura will come home for Christmas break this weekend, and she’ll see it for the first time. (Yes, we’ve kept a bedroom for her to make sure she keeps coming home to visit!)
This feels like a new chapter in our lives, and I will admit to feeling a bit sad last week during the final walk-through of what had been my dream home, a place where I wrote many novels in the gazebo we added as my summer office. (Construction photo below.) I loved to write while overlooking the lake, or in a comfy chair in the winter, gazing at snow falling on pine trees. I’m including a few pictures here, in memoriam.
I will miss this house–especially the sunsets over the lake–but I’m sure the new owner will love it as much as we did. (And stay tuned for pictures of our NEW house in my next blog post!)
