The day has arrived, we're leaving home. Our good friends, Mickey and Cindy came over at 7:30 in the morning to pick up their new to them TV and stand plus a few other odds and ends I had earmarked for Cindy. Mickey helped Bob put the mattress in the 5th wheel and Cindy helped me put the last minute things in the trailer. At this point we're just throwing stuff on the bed, there was no place to put them anyway.
Bob went to motor vehicle and I went and visited some neighbors and then sat on the porch with Tanya for awhile.
Bob and I did a final walk through the house and as I closed the door for the final time,,,I cried.
We said our "so longs" to Ed and Bev, you guessed it, I cried. We made a stop down the street to say "so long" to John and Ruby, a wonderful older couple that Bob visited with on an almost daily basis. He's going to miss his buddy John, this I am sure of. Then came Tanya....Use your imagination on this one. I'll only cry if I have to write it out.
One stop at Walmart to pick up film I had dropped off there and then we are fulltimers!
Let the adventure begin......
Here's where we go from
REAL ESTATE
to
WHEEL ESTATE
I-95 here we come - Florida bound.
We made it the first day as far as southern Virginia. With the unexpected trip the DMV we didn't start as early as we hoped so therefore didn't get as far as we hoped.
We stayed in a nondescript mom and pop campground the first night.
We're running out of room in the 5th wheel already. Where, oh where are we gonna put this stuff? Bob showed me this tiny little pile of personal stuff he just has to have with him. OK, fine, but do you really need eleven pairs of dress pants? I think not! We weeded some more out and made another trip to Goodwill.
We still have a sofa and end table to get rid of in addition to the mattress from the RV. The living room sofa is "older" but still serviceable. I listed them on The Freecycle Network, a really cool site that lets you list things you want to give away to local people. If someone wants what you have to give away they contact you by email and you can then exchange phone numbers to set up times and give directions to your home. The sofa we had was also a queen sized sofa bed and it is VERY heavy. I told the young, 9 months pregnant woman she would have to bring help to load it as I knew I couldn't lift it even with the help of her husband and I didn't know if Bob would be home at the appointed hour. Lo and behold she called and said they couldn't be here at the agreed upon time of 6:30 but could make it at 9:30. Just what I wanted to hear! (Bob too!) So at 9:30 a knock comes at the door and there she stood - out to H E R E! In walked her husband, all 6 ft 4 of him weighing in at about 105 pounds. That's it, no help. To add further to the problem he had stitches in his hand for a deep cut he had gotten at work that day. Bob was not a happy camper. They did, somehow get it loaded into their pickup truck.
Our dog, Shag, is totally confused now. She always curled up in the right hand corner of the sofa to sleep. She walked around the coffee table and started to make her jump when she realized it wasn't there. She walked around the other side of the table and looked again. She looked at Bob as if to ask, "What the heck is going on here, where's my sofa?"
One week to go. Reality is setting in now. I can cry at the drop of a hat. Just thinking about saying "so long" to family and friends breaks my heart.We're making lists again of things we need to do such as calls that need to be made, people we have to see before we go, get the truck through inspection...so much stuff to do, so little time.The house still isn't sold. We talked with our agent today and decided to give $2000 settlement help. Maybe that will spur someone into making an offer. It's open house day again and we had several lookers come through. One seemed especially interested, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.Today I said goodbye to Karen, a longtime friend. She thinks we're nuts and repeatedly told me that there is always a bed in her house for me. Friends like her are few and far between. I'm glad she's mine.
We decided today that our target date to be on the road is November 11th.Today we emptied the 5th wheel of the things we know we aren't going to take with us. WOW! We have lots of room to put things. This is going to be a piece of cake.Bob's older son, Timothy, came by today and left with a truck full of tools. Bob has sorted through all of his tools and is determined to go "fully tooled" for any job that may come his way. With what he's taking with us we could open a hardware store, but there's no getting between him and his hammers and screwdrivers and power tools and levels and on and on and on.I had the unpleasant task of going through my holiday ceramics I've made over the years. I've given all but one away to family and friends.
Today we had a couple come through the house for the second time. My hopes are soaring! They love the house and I can tell they want it badly. Then they dropped the bomb on us. They have to sell an older mobile home in not the greatest of parks first. They asked if we would pull the house off the market and wait for them. They went on further to say that would have their place ready for sale in about a month or so. EXCUSE ME???? Let me see if I've got this right.... you want me to pull our house off the market, wait for you to replace a floor, not just carpet or tile but the FLOOR, sell this older trailer in a less than desirable location and hope you qualify for a mortgage because you haven't' even been to the bank yet? uh....NO! It could take you 6 months to a year to sell your place. Thanks, but no thanks!
The house still isn't sold. We are concerned about this because we'll have to make mortgage payments if we're here or not. If it isn't sold very soon, we're going anyway.
We didn't get out of Delaware last week like we hoped and it doesn't look like we're going to get of here this week either, too many loose ends to take care of.
Today we listed my 66 Mustang on Ebay. This was a gift from Bob on my 50th birthday. It is 95% restored with all the parts to finish it included. It just kills me to get rid of it, I never even got to drive it. There isn't enough time to finish it as we want to be out of here by the time the cold weather sets in. Enough said about that.
The house is still on the market and I'm holding open houses on my own every Sunday. We've had quite a few come through but still no offers. How discouraging.
We've got a list now of who's getting what as far as the household furnishings are concerned.
Time is flying by for us now. We're making many more trips to Goodwill and our trash collectors hate us. Some weeks there is so much we have to put out stuff at our neighbors, Ed and Bev's. Thank heavens for great neighbors like them.
Our goal is to be out of here by the last week of October or the first week of November at the latest. We'll go to Virginia to meet up with good camping buddies, Rich and Jackie Burck of VA and Bobby and Shelly Evans of lower, slower Delaware. We met Rich and Jackie several years ago at Kiptopeke State Park in Virginia and have been friends ever since. They started their full timing adventure this summer but haven't made it out of Virginia as yet. We met Bobby and Shelly through RV.Net an online forum for RV'ers. They too will start their full time adventure soon. Their house sold for asking price in one day! Lucky them! Both Jackie and Shelly will be travel nurses, moving to a new assignment every 13 weeks or so.
Bob and I will be "workampers", a term to describe people like us who live in their RV and work at campgrounds (or sometimes on the outside) for site and wages. Typically, Bob will work at maintenance since he is a carpenter by trade and well versed in the others and I'll work in the campground office/store.
We've got a job lined up in Florida for the winter and a job for summer of 2007 in Missouri.
We've had calls from home buyers wanting to the see the house. They came, they saw, they didn't buy.We had our first open house and Bob made himself scarce but I hung around with Rick, our agent. I had even put a roast in the crock pot so the house smelled oh so good We had two people come through and I left out the back door as soon as they drove up. What a disappointment! What is happening? Why isn't this house selling? Its been six whole days and not one offer! Oh well, at least we had a good dinner.Meanwhile, we're still downsizing.We did manage one camping trip to see our campground owner friends, John and Patty of Warwick Woods Campground. If you ever get to Pennsylvania, in their neck of the woods, be sure to look them up and tell them Bob and Snookie sent you. They run a very nice campground. John and Patty treated us to dinner and it gave us a chance to talk without the "business" interfering with our time together. Thanks John and Patty!On September 29th Bob retired from his full time job with the Delaware National Guard. To celebrate we joined our nearest and dearest at a crab feast at the Elks Club where we're members. A good time was had by all.
The painting is done and new carpet was installed the first week of this month. We have just a few little odds and ends projects to do. Its time to call in the real estate agents to interview. We decided to interview three agents, two from well known agencies and one from an agency that neither one of us had ever heard of but advertised 3% total commission. Now THAT is right up my alley, the more money we put in our pocket the happier I am. It was a hard decision to pick just one, we like all of them. In fact, one of them is even a friend of ours. The dollar signs swayed me and we went with the lesser known company (to us) Sellers Connection.On September 9th we welcomed Brittany Pierce into our family when she married our nephew Dusty. Of course Brittany has been a part of our family for a lot of years already as they started dating when they were young teenagers. She was a beautiful bride and we wish them many years of happiness.September 10th is the date Bob has been waiting for. Today is the day he retires from the Delaware National Guard. We arrived at the armory at 7 a.m. and met my parents and uncle there for the ceremony. Bob was awarded several medals and given some special mementos of his National Guard career. He was also promoted to the state recognized rank of Sergeant Major (E-9). Bob served 33 years in the Armed Services with tours in Vietnam and Desert Storm.
This is the last project did for the National Guard during his weekend drills. He worked with local Seabee unit to complete this.On September 12th the For Sale was planted. I cried. This was after all our first and only home for the last 26 years. As our agent, Rick Carll left he said, "I wouldn't be surprised if it sells this weekend". Bob and I stood in the front yard waving goodbye to him thinking the same thing. Bob had put so much work into it these past few months it was just in great shape and also had that all important "curb appeal". Little did we know that September 12th is the date the market died in our area.September 15th marked my last day at work for Horizon Services. I had only worked for this company for a few months in a part time status but they were kind enough to surprise me with a little going away party. Although I hadn't worked there very long I truly did enjoy it and more importantly, the people I worked with.
Still no camping for us, we're way too busy sorting through more STUFF to get rid of, still painting, doing the landscape and trying to keep up with the all the projects that we keep adding to the list. Will this ever end?
The neighbors homes are up for sale. Lots of people looking, both sold in a matter of days. One took just two days to sell and they got their asking price and other sold in 12 days, also getting their asking price. Good news for us!I gave notice to my employer this month, one more thing to cross off the list of Things To Do.Bob celebrated his 58th birthday on the 30th. Didn't do anything special, he painted.
We're going camping for the first time this year. We "won" tickets for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill on Ebay. We'll have to travel to West Virginia to see them but that's ok. Well, it was OK until we found out just a few hours before the concert that it was canceled due to McGraw's sore throat. Oh well, at we least got to see a little bit of West Virginia and we met some nice people at "Big Earl's Campground".Things around the house are in high gear now. We're painting, fixing and spending a ton of money on materials. We're looking to put the house on the market in late August or early September. Hours are long as we work at our jobs and then come home to work on the house.We found out two of our neighbors are putting their houses up for sale in August, that's a good thing, will make for lots of real estate traffic.I turned 53 the 26th of this month, no big deal this year, just another day.
June already and we haven't been camping once this year.
This is the month our car learns its way to the Goodwill drop off point. Seems like I just have to get in, say Goodwill and it takes off in the right direction. We've made lots of trips to Goodwill!
We have become makers of lists. Lists for things that have to be done to get the house ready for market, lists of calls to be made for one reason or another, lists of things we have to get to start our full time adventure. At least it didn't get to the point that we had a list of lists!
Our list for getting the house ready is growing by leaps and bounds. By the time its done it will be a brand new house and it was in darn good shape to begin with. We'll do re-do the landscaping, paint throughout, new carpeting throughout, new roof on our shed/porch building and list goes on....and on.....and on.
This is the month that we really get involved with EBAY. The people at the post office and the UPS store know me by name now. Ebay is a great thing! We sold so many things on Ebay and got a good return to boot. Why didn't we put that router and bits on Ebay? Oh well, hindsight is always 20-20.
Our fulltiming adventure is getting closer and closer and the downsizing begins in earnest this month. We're having a .......
Yard Sale
Its not like we can just move our belongings into the RV and take off. OH NO! That would be much too easy. We have to give notice to our jobs, we have to sell our house and we have to get rid of our stuff, keeping only what we really, really need and what will FIT in the RV without going thousands of pounds overweight in the 35 foot fifth wheel we'll call "home".
So how does one get rid of their STUFF you ask? YARD SALE! We started planning this yard sale months ago, picked out the date and then talked our neighbors into having one the same day. They say misery loves company don't they? Ok, the date is May 20th for the big sale!
We started weeks ago eyeing our belongings and thinking BIG BUCKS! Now that's a laugh! We went thru every nook and cranny pulling out things we had forgotten we even had. Just how does one accumulate so much stuff over 26 years? We started loading our porch with STUFF getting ready for the big day. Now, not only did we have our STUFF, but I invited my niece, Ryann, who is moving to bring over her STUFF and my good friend Cindy who is moving to the beach (eventually) to bring her STUFF too. It took Ry in an Explorer, fully loaded, to get her belongings to my house the night before. It took Cindy a jam packed Blazer and my car trunk and back seat to get her STUFF here. The original thought was that Ryann would take off work on this particular Saturday but things didn't quite work out that way. No problem, we'll put her STUFF out and sell it for her. Cindy, my dear direction challenged friend was to be at my house at six in the morning but managed to show up at 7:30 because she got lost in the 8 miles from her house to mine. But hey, she knows how to get to Lums Pond now!
Bob and I spent the Sunday before pricing our STUFF. Our price ranges for what things should sell for were worlds apart. I'm more in the Lord & Taylor price range and he's in the Walmart sale rack price range. I mean come on, do you remember how much we paid for this STUFF? So the pricing was finally done and all week long we found more,,,well, you guessed it...STUFF.
Now Bob has every tool known to man in the modern world and it has to go. But does it have to go so CHEAPLY? We let a router with all the bits go for $12.00! I think we should have asked at least $40!
Bob took off a half a day the day before our sale so that he could "build" tables for us to put our STUFF out on. You know the kind, 4 x 8 sheets of plywood screwed into sawhorses for stability. Ryann brought two tables and we had the lawn.
OK! Its YARD SALE DAY! I'm up at 4:45! Yes, in the morning. Kelly, my neighbor, and I are tasked with getting the signs we made out early. We put out 18 signs in a two mile span of a busy road near our home. Great signs! Catchy phrases, bright yellow poster board, we were determined to draw in every motorist from Route 40 to Route 273 and every side street in between the two. The sun comes up and we repeatedly say, we're gonna have a great day, great weather, couldn't be better. We get home about an hour later and the neighbors are outside, wiping sleep from their eyes as everyone gets ready for the SALE! Everyone has their tables out and are going back to their staging areas to start bringing out the goodies when it started. The RAIN started! Wait! This can't be happening, Cecily, the weather girl, didn't say anything about rain on the 11 o'clock news last night! There can't be rain on yard sale day! (Say that in the tone Tom Hanks used in A League of Their Own when he said, "There's no crying in baseball!) It wasn't a heavy rain, just a steady light sprinkle, enough that you couldn't put your STUFF out. The sky let its droplets of H20 fall for two hours. Look! Over there! Its getting brighter! See that patch of blue in the sky??? Its gonna clear, it'll be ok....we told ourselves over and over again. Our yard sale was supposed to start at 8am and here it is 9 and we're just starting to put the sale items on the tables. Now we thought we had a lot of STUFF to begin with, but add Cindy's STUFF and Ryann's STUFF, geesh, I was tired just putting it out!
OK, tables are filled with our worldly possessions and we're waiting for customers to come, their pockets bulging with fives and tens. And we waited. And we waited some more. Ok, here comes another baseball movie analogy: Remember in "A Field of Dreams" when the voice said, "Build it and they will come"? Well, friends, we built it and they DIDN'T COME! Neighbors walking from house to house saying over and over again, "I don't understand it, why isn't anyone coming? We always have good yard sales, we always have tons of traffic for this". We finally concluded that yard salers (is that a word) got up, looked outside at the drizzle and said to themselves, "I'm not going out in this, nobody will have a yard sale today" and promptly turned over and went back to sleep.
The first customer arrives! Yep, at 11 am our first customer arrived! We were so thankful that if this man had asked us to bow down and kiss his feet we would have fought for the first place in line to do it!!! Little by little they came, they didn't buy, but they came. I just sat there thinking about having to drag all this STUFF back to the porch.
As it happened, Ryann did pretty well with the baby stuff she had to get rid of and some of her household items. Cindy made $1.50 I think. We came out at about $35.00. What a huge disappointment! All that work for a lousy $35.00. Ok, we drag all the stuff back to the porch, I'm exhausted. My back hurts, my feet hurt, I'm tired and we still have tons of STUFF!
There was talk of going to the Farmer's Market for their outdoor flea market on Sunday. TONS of people there, we're sure to sell everything (there's that optimistic feeling coming out in me again). I call the Farmer's Market to find out the particulars of selling there and the lady says if you want to get a space be here at 4am and then there's no guarantee that there will be space available. Four in the morning???? Is she nuts? NO WAY, I can't do it, but our neighbor went, got there at 4 and found not a space to be had. So he put some signs up again, the originals were gone, I don't know where they went, and set his STUFF out. Here comes Bob at 6:45,,,come on Snook, get up, we gotta get our STUFF out. In case there are small children reading this I'll keep what was going thru my head to myself. I did NOT want to get up. But I did. And they came! They really came! We didn't put everything we had out, just the high dollar (in Bob's mind) STUFF. We sold a good amount of stuff really cheap, just to get it the hell out of here! Did we sell half our STUFF? NO! Did we sell a quarter of our STUFF? NO! Just some of it.
One of our customers told us about a flea market that is going to take place the following Saturday at a middle school parking lot on a busy road not far from where we live. I jump at accepting the information she has about it and we've decided to go there. Now, how are we going to get our STUFF there? Although we have a huge pickup truck the bed of it is useless as we have the 5th wheel hitch and two tool boxes in it. Our neighbor Duane has a pickup but his will be used to get the borrowed tables from the Elks Club to the sale. I know! I've seen trucks at Lowe's with signs that say Rent Me for $19.95. We'll rent one of those for the STUFF! Our STUFF, Duane's STUFF, Cindy's STUFF, Ryann's STUFF. We'll sell our STUFF there! So off to the phone I go to call Lowe's. Yes, they have trucks for rent and yes they are $19.95. Now you know there is always a catch and the words "If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is" rang true here. Its $19.95 for the first 45 minutes and $5.00 for every 15 minutes after that. That is NOT going to work! It could end up costing us more than we could even make. So we're racking our brains wondering what to do. Rent a U-Haul? No, too much money up front. Duane has a trailer he hauls cars on....nope, no sides, our STUFF would slide off. What are we going to do? How are we gonna get our STUFF there? Then I had a lightbulb moment! My dear friend Gordon has a trailer! Will he lend to us? I called him and we played phone tag until we finally connected. YES! He'll lend it to us and he wants to see our STUFF too! I feel a sale coming on.
So that's where we are...waiting for this coming Saturday. I'll let you know how we do.
Oh yeah, our final tally for the two days was: US: $121.00 Ryann: $97.45 Cindy: Poor Cindy only made $8.00, But hey,,,,next Saturday is coming!
We've been planning this for a long time. This odyssey started back in 1991 when my brother, Bill, and sister-in-law Michelle gave us their 20 year old pop up because they were updating to a travel trailer. We kept that for a year and moved "up" to a 22 year old Concord travel trailer that we bought from a friends brother for $500.00. We put a lot of elbow grease into that 22 footer and had many a good time in it the five years we had it. In 97' we bought our first brand new travel trailer, a Fleetwood Mallard. We only kept that a year because we kept hearing horror stories about Fleetwood but I have to admit we never had a problem with it. Next came our 98' Jayco Designer. The Jayco lasted 4 years when the "itch" hit again, which brings us to the Kountry Star.
Like I said earlier this has been a long time coming for us. We've been talking and dreaming about his for the past 12 years. It had been decided that we would hit the road when Bob retired at age 60 from his State of Delaware job with the Delaware National Guard. With things getting so heated in the Middle East we decided not to wait and take the chance that Bob would be activated again and that the time had come to take to the road.
Welcome to our fulltimer's web site.We are Bob and Snookie Quinn, (and furkid, Shag) formerly of Newark, Delaware, formerly being the operative word here.
As of Monday, November 13, 2006 at precisely 11:51 a.m., when we finished our last errand, we became "fulltimers".
We are living fulltime in our 2002 Newmar, Kountry Star fifth wheel trailer. It's 35 feet long and has triple slide outs. All the comforts of home to be sure without the lawn mowing, snow shoveling, property and school taxes and all the other things that go hand in hand with home ownership.
You are invited to follow along on our adventure as we travel the highways and byways of this great country of ours. We'll share with you the places we go, the people we meet and the things we do.
LET THE ADVENTURE BEGIN!!!
(scroll)Click on "newer post" on the bottom left of each page for the next installment. Sometimes there will be more than one posting to a page. Always scroll down so that you can read them in order You can click on the pictures to make them bigger. After viewing them in the larger size click on the back button.
