Like most folks, we spend a lot of time at home.  We had made our house in Lakewood Washington a very comfortable and inviting place and had watched (and labored) as our garden matured.  From our family room we could watch the birds come into our back yard, attracted by the bird feeders we had put up.  We could also watch the squirrels come in, attracted by the seed the birds spilled. Click here to see the Lakewood house and garden.

Then it was late November of 2016. We had flown down to Texas to provide support (cleaning, cooking, etc.) before and after the birth of our granddaughter. She was born on November 30th and she changed our lives. Our younger son Matt and his wife Lacey and our granddaughter Cassidy live in Frisco Texas (about 20 miles north of Dallas) and our older son Tom lives in Houston. We talked it over and decided it was time to downsize and be with family. We flew back to Lakewood on December 10th and started interviewing realtors.

We selected an agent and our house went on the market shortly after January 1st. It seemed as if very little (if anything) was happening through January and well into February so we cancelled the listing. There was a house that had gone on the market just down the street and we were familiar with it. The priest in our church had lived there and separated off a small piece of land and had a tiny house built for his mother-in-law. It was really only one bedroom but had another room that could be made to look like a bedroom, so the agent moved a bed into that room and listed it as two bedrooms at $500,000. She sold it in a few days for full price.

Needless to say, that got our attention. We contacted her and she came over and took a look at our home. She felt the price at which we had it listed before cancelling the listing was just right. She brought her stuff over and prepared our home in her way and sent her photographer over on Wednesday, March 1st. The house went back on the market on the 2nd and we had an open house scheduled for Saturday, the 4th. That afternoon there was a request for a showing Saturday evening and on Sunday we were told we had a full price offer. We had to be out by the end of the month, but accepted the offer and started packing.

It's amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in twenty years. We made so many trips to the Goodwill store that our car could have probably made the trip on its own. We got bids from a couple of movers but decided to use PODS. We had two 16' PODS delivered to our driveway and hired two guys our agent recommended to pack up our belongings and load the PODS. We couldn't take any of our power equipment with us, so we sold it all to our buyers, along with our patio sets. We had doubts that everything would fit, but the guys worked late into the last evening and stuffed it all in. We had arranged for a friend to drive Mel's Honda CR-V to Texas and loaded the backend with a lot of small stuff. On April 1st we got into the Mustang and started our own drive down.

We drove to Grants Pass to visit my sister on the way down, and then drove through eastern Oregon to avoid California. We spent evenings looking on-line at properties in the Frisco area and identified five possibilities. We kept in touch with an agent in Frisco and she arranged showings of all five the day after we arrived. On April 8th we visited all five properties and one of them checked off pretty much all the boxes. We had decided we wanted a single story home around 2,800 square feet on a lot no more than 1/4 acre. This one is 2,760 square feet and the lot is .21 acres. It has a very nice Viking gas cook top in a nice kitchen, access to a three car garage via an alley in the back and an electric gate that closes off the driveway. So we bought it. We found a rental house we could occupy until closing and on April 10th we became Cassidy's day care. We would pick her up in the morning and they would pick her up from us in the evening. We closed on our new home on May 4th and moved in on the 5th.

Click here for photos of our Frisco house and gardens.