Chapter One — Camping at 73

We didn’t intend to be campers at our age. But it seemed the most logical option for our situation.

Let me back up the truck…

Our home was on a lake with a beautiful view. We had a pontoon boat and enjoyed going out fishing, cruising, and enjoying the fabulous 4th of July fireworks. But the pontoon got to be a lot of work (cleaning bird “presents”, upkeep, etc.), and fishing seemed to wane, so we decided to sell the boat in 2021. We said goodbye (sort of) to our floating living room, and sold it to a neighbor across the creek. What we didn’t realize was how hard it was to look out the kitchen window to see “our” boat sitting on his lift…for a whole summer [sigh]. We truly missed that boat.

I told Sweetie, it doesn’t make sense to live on a lake without a boat. We had other issues which gave us thoughts of moving. But they were only thoughts.

Trying to keep things organized became frustrating for lack of storage space. It’s amazing how much stuff one could accumulate in six years. And being a crafter (cross stitch, stamping, quilting, etc), well, need I say more?

Our home only had a crawl space, which became increasingly difficult to maneuver. “Oh, those Christmas boxes are way over there?” The knees didn’t allow a duck crawl anymore. So frustration set in. Our closets were full. We had no room for more than 2 guests when we had overnight company. Our guest room was cramped. We started going through things and eliminating them, but that was a long slow process.

The thought of moving was daunting, so we kept putting it off. We were not happy with the doctors in McHenry, and I know Sweetie missed his doctor in Bourbonnais. All my friends lived in the South suburbs, so I told Sweetie, I would move farther South for a bigger sewing/craft room. But we really didn’t know where we wanted to go. We talked about moving out of state, but family and friends are here, and Sweetie really wanted to go back to his former doctor’s office (even though Dr. Moss took a job in St. Louis. ☹) I was ok with that. But again, it was just talk at that point.

In November of 2022, we received a call from a former real estate agent of Sweetie’s, whom I will refer to as Mr. Canary. We hadn’t talked to him in years, and he was just touching base to see if we were interested in looking for a new home. It was quite ironic, because Sweetie and I had been considering that for some time. So we thought “why not? It won’t hurt to go look.”

So Mr. Canary showed us a few homes. The first was beautiful, but 3,000 square feet?! Um, no. We don’t need that much space. We saw a smaller house under construction, but it was across the street from a cemetery. Some people might like quiet neighbors like that, but after a water view, a cemetery view was out of the question!

Then he showed us one on Perry Street that was 3500 square feet! “Canary! What part of ‘smaller than 3000’ don’t you get?!” Of course, I didn’t say that to him. I swear realtors don’t listen to what you want. They show you what will give them the biggest paycheck. We see this all the time on shows like House Hunters, and have experienced this ourselves. (Apologies to any readers who may be a realtor and don’t follow those practices.)

However, we both found things about the Perry house, though really dated, that we just loved. We kept thinking about it, and actually went to see it a 2nd time. We had a vision for what this house could be. So December 5, we put In an offer! EEK! After some negotiations, they accepted our offer with a contingency that we sell our house. We arranged for a house inspection. Wow, that was an eye opener! The house needed a LOT more work than we thought, but we were up for the task.

Back to our lake house…

Now the mad scramble began, finding a realtor (!), trying to make the house presentable for photos, and starting to box things up that we could live without for awhile. (if we could live without them for awhile, do we really need them??)

We interviewed 3 realtors. We decided to use a realtor (we’ll call him KC) that Sweetie’s friend used to sell his house. He only charged a 2% commission if HE sold the house. 4% if another realtor sold that house. That should have been our clue.

But on December 5, 2022 we listed our house. We thought he set the price a little too high but we figured he was the professional and you could always lower the price. I told Sweetie, “this is the worst time to put the house on the market. People aren’t house shopping. They’re shopping for Christmas and getting ready for the holidays.” We didn’t put up a Christmas tree, and hung no decorations. It was a sad Christmas. But we had Christmas dinner with Sweetie’s family, so that cheered things up.

KC did very little to show our house. He kept telling us we should lower the price. What??!! I said to him, “You set the price sweetheart.” We did eventually lower the price a few times. But in the 3 months we had the listing with him, he didn’t bring anyone through to see the house (other agents did, however). KC had an open house, that had no advertising, and only ONE person came through! Two balloons attached to his sign looked more like a birthday party or garage sale than an open house. There wasn’t even an open house sign!

We had few showings with various comments… “too expensive”, “too close to a busy road”, and our favorite…“can I put up a fence?” REALLY?! On a lakefront? Oh, well, he didn’t buy it anyway. But no bites.

KC was more interested in getting the listing and collecting his commission. He was nothing more than a listing agent. But he claimed he had an open house. Big deal.

We were thoroughly disgusted with him and were ready to fire him, when, wouldn’t you know it, we got an offer! It was a lowball offer, but it was something! So KC decides to counter-offer with a price we thought was too high, but we figured he knew what he was doing and that they’d counter again. But the buyers said, “We’ll keep looking.” I was livid! We were going to lose the only offer we had because of him!

So I did something I knew was rather unethical…I called THEIR realtor! She was most pleasant and we had a nice chat. I told her the whole situation and what our bottom line was, which was lower than the offer KC presented to them. I was not going to lose this sale because of him!!

So after a few days, they offered our bottom line price and we finally had a contract on our house! And after doing nothing, KC got his damn commission.

Not to complain, but just a sidebar here…when we sold our townhouse, our realtor gave us a really nice 6-pack cooler with a removable plastic insert. When we bought our lake house, our realtor gave us a beautiful engraved Cutco carving knife with our names on it! KC gave us a $6.98 container of fresh fruit from Jewel. I guess that’s all you get when you pay a 2% commission. (not that we were looking for a gift, but really?

Do you think we’d refer him to anyone?!)

Now we only had one problem…we had nowhere to move to!

So backtrack to the end of our contract with the Perry house. The owner extended it once, but at the end of the month-long extension, she wouldn’t renew it again because we hadn’t sold our house, and we were out. We were crushed, but understood. We got our earnest money back and continued our search.

Sweetie found a beautiful home for sale by owner. So we made an appointment to see it. It was gorgeous! It needed no work except it didn’t have my sewing room. But we figured out how to make it work. We went to the car and asked each other what we thought about the house. He loved it. I loved it. I said “so, should we go home and think about it?” He said, “Why? Let’s go make them an offer.” So we got back out of the car and rang the doorbell. The owners had a cute little sign outside with a bucket of styrofoam balls, that said “snowballs for sale - 5 cents”. They answered and I said, “We’d like to buy a snowball. I mean, we’d like to buy your house.” So we went back in, and negotiated a price, which they accepted…again, on a contingency. So we’re all excited about finding another house and continued the packing.

A few weeks later, Sweetie and I are in the grocery store and he gets a phone call. I continue shopping and I heard him say “Rita is not gonna be happy about that.” He hung up and I knew it was some kind of bad news.

He said, “That was our attorney. They got a cash offer plus $1000. We have 24 hours to match that.” But of course, our house didn’t even have one offer by that point, so we knew we couldn’t match that. Great. We lost another house. But we at least got our earnest money back again.

Now that our house finally had an offer, panic started setting in. We looked at a number of houses with several different realtors, and some houses were ridiculous. High priced and needing a lot of work, or just didn’t have the layout we wanted. There was enough adventure here to write a whole chapter! But we’ll skip that part.

Nothing met our criteria. Sweetie wanted a 3-car garage (like we had at the lake house), and we both wanted a basement. And of course, my sewing room. It was getting disheartening.

We stopped in to visit a builder (near Sweetie’s daughter’s house.) And after talking to the builder, we decided to quit the search and build a house. We didn’t really want to build, but thought we’d be starting fresh with everything new, no replacing or fixing up, and a one-year warranty.

He had one house that was already under roof, but not wrapped yet, that would probably have been finished by the time we closed on our house. So we talked about adding on a room for my sewing room. He said that could be done. A few days later he called and said he couldn’t get a permit because the room would be too close to the lot line. Our hearts sank yet again.

But he then said, “but I have another lot that’s bigger that would fit your studio.” The only caveat is he’d have to start the house from scratch, which would finish mid-September, providing there were no backorders or issues with setbacks because of weather. He knew our situation and said he’d pull all his guys to make our house a first priority. So we agreed and signed a contract.

But now what do we do?! We still had the issue of having nowhere to live! We looked at apartments, but they were unfurnished. We didn’t want to move our furniture twice.

Then he said, “my sister would probably rent you her house, which is furnished. She lives in Arizona and wasn’t coming back this year.” So Sweetie gave her a call, and even though the house was an hour farther south of Bourbonnais, we were rather desperate. She said, “Well, I thought we should rent the house for $3,000 a month, but my husband said $4000.” What??!!! Sweetie politely said, “thank you, but we can’t do that.” I flipped out! “$4,000 a month times 4 months is $16,000!!! For $16,000,, we could buy an RV!”

So we did.