Home at last!

For years now I dreamt of moving back home to Arkansas and not only starting life over but living my remaining days in a place so full of greenery and nature and peace, that I could just barely stand it. And once we moved to Arkansas in November 2017 we found ourselves in Blytheville, in an urban area, at my Mom's house during our transition!

We had a few bumps along the way, we were in an urban hilly area in Pocahontas for about 4 months. We had planned to purchase that house because we just couldn't find anything else to buy in the hill land, in the area that I love where most of my family lives. It's very rural, full of farmers and country people and old Fords and more cows than you can count. But due to its size, there just isn't ever hardly anything for sale. And most land you could find would be an acre here or there or...200 acres! The home for sale were either way too much or not on enough land, there was always something that wasn't working out. And when it comes to accomplishing life goals, I can be semi-inpatient...especially when I'm currently sitting in a situation I'm unhappy with and wanting to get out of.

Well the way the cards fell; my marriage fell apart and right at the same time as that was happening we were sitting on the brink of financial ruin, unable to find a solution to hardly any of our problems, be that together or us apart. Then one day I heard about a rental house a friend had in that perfect small town where I wanted to raise my boys, in the right school district and it sat on 2 acres with 12 behind I could also lease. We went to see it and I fell in love. At the time I wasn't even thinking about it being a house for us, we weren't considering moving. As a few weeks went by, the idea of this home came up again and I strongly considered it. I talked to the owner and we made some plans. Within a couple of weeks we were moving. The move alone would save us about $1200/mth and that was the break we needed. It also put me 4 miles from most of my family and the boys in the school I moved them here for. So in many ways it was a win win.

But what really pressed upon my soul that I want to share in this post...is the people! The people came out of everywhere to welcome me, help me and maybe to them they were just saying hi but for me it was something I needed. It was almost like a confirmation in my soul that I had made the right choice. People stopped by to bring us veggies from their garden, they stopped by randomly to say hi, they helped us move, they helped me fix things! There for the first 2 weeks they were random people, family and friends, stopping by my house daily! It was absolutely refreshing! Put that on top of being blessed with a gorgeous eastern view of the sun rise every morning, surrounded by so many huge OLD oak trees (my favorite), the home feeling safe and cozy and I was and still am on cloud 9 and feeling beyond blessed.

The situations or circumstances that lead us to this place were anything other than beautiful and grand and they sure didn't involve great choices...mistakes were made, feelings were hurt, lives were changed...but here we are. And when you get to a beautiful place in life it's important to acknowledge everything it took to get here. The nights I sat and cried feeling hopeless and confused, not knowing how I was going to save my family. The days spent worrying about how I was going to pay this or that bill, longing for my life in the country. It all lead me down this path that lead me to this beautiful little home in the country side, rolling hills of pasture, neighbors with chickens and gardens and a beautiful spot to call my own until life takes me in another direction again.

Xoxo,

Elizabeth

#lifelongdream #goals #mistakes #thecountrylife #myfuturefarm #our2acres #arkansasozarks

We bought land in the Arkansas Ozarks in March 2018!

We enjoyed November 2017 through January 2018 looking for land in Arkansas! During that time I was still working from home 40-60 hours as a Realtor/Transaction Coordinator for a team in Arizona and Chad wasn't able to find local work so he was unemployed most of that time. Thankfully in February we were able to find him some painting work with a friend of mine and after a month of that that lead into us starting our own painting business, #bigbuckspainting and that was good for us! We didn't make a ton of money at it but projects came often enough to keep Chad busy and bring in an income which was a huge relief we needed at the time.

We were fortunate enough to find out 5 acres outside of Pocahontas, Arkansas for sale where the seller was willing to do seller financing and so we didn't have to qualify for a traditional loan. If we would have to do that then we wouldn't have been able to do it so it was a huge blessing for us!

Here is the video where I talk about the excitement and worry of writing an offer on the land,

In this video we take our subscribers out to the land for a full walk thru for the first time since getting our offer accepted. We are IN ESCROW!!!

The day we closed on our land! It was an awesome experience! Now we have land, but no home!

Being land owners was a huge goal and accomplishment for us but it still didn't solve any problems for putting a roof over our kids heads or allowing us to not feel homeless. Granted we had an awesome safe home over at my Mom's but we were eager to get to our own place and settle in, 5 months after moving to Arkansas!

The process of relocating across the country when you don't make a ton of money or have a ton of money saved up...is hard and it takes some time. We sold almost everything we owned to move to Arkansas cheaply and that was not only to save money but also because we were 100% on board with living in a camper for a year. But as time drug on we realized that wasn't going to work.

We toyed with the idea of buying a shed to convert to a tiny home/cabin on our land and you can see the video tour here where we toured a 14x60 shed but in the end we realized that wouldn't work for us either because it was going to cost us at least $5,000 to get that onto our land and the utilities we needed put in but that huge cost was primarily due to the water costing us $2000 to bring it in from the city, when a well would have cost us $10,000.  And that would be an empty shell of a cabin delivered to the land, not livable. So again we went down a rabbit hole and did more research to try to find a way to be on or near our land, before the boys started school again in the fall so we had about 4 months to figure something out.

In our next blog post I'll update you on what we figured out!

xoxo,
Elizabeth

#newland #newhomestead #arkansasland #arkansas #arkansasbackwoods #homestead

Jan-May 2015

A little side story, I had bought a house while in Arkansas. And I'm sure if I was blogging back then there would have been 100 posts about it! I'll share some pictures of that little...adventure...

In my defense, lol, I was (at that point) a Mama Bear who felt "homeless" essentially and my goal was to refocus my life, find some stable ground and rebuild a life for myself and Riley after the break up from my ex-fiance which I was not expecting. So when I was back home for Thanksgiving, I saw this house for sale. Dirt cheap (less than $10k) and it needed a lot of work...a lot! The floor had fallen in about half of the house. But it was so cheap and it was in the small town next to where my bff lives so I did some thinking, talked to my family, talked to Riley, ran some numbers. Then I decided I could afford it. And the plan was to buy it, remodel it to make it livable and Riley and I move back to Arkansas to be near family. And I would run my Arizona real estate team from Arkansas, via the wonderful internet. So I bought the house and we closed on it around Christmas during that second visit out to Arkansas.

It was in BAD shape. But...as a lover of homes all I saw was the original wood doors, original doors knobs, the brick fireplace, etc. I knew it needed a ton of work but I did have an inspection and the foundation was solid, roof was good, frame was good but it just needed all new flooring, some new floor joists and likely updated electrical and plumbing plus all the finishing items. 

This is what it looked like the day we closed on it; a soggy December winter day.

I knew we'd be leaving the house soon to go back to Arizona so I wanted the house to look "cared for" and not abandoned as it had previously so I knew I had to do something with the outside first so that strangers or neighbors wouldn't think it was just a sad, empty house. So I spray painted that front porch area that looked so horrible. Truly it needed to be replaced but this was a temporary, visual fix. I put up a flag (which I do everywhere I live) and put up a nice wreath on the door my Mom made me. We changed all the door knobs and locks on the 3 exterior doors. Three of the windows that had been missing or broken got replaced so that the house was now "sealed up" and secure.

Front porch got cleaned up to reveal a painted red concrete porch which was a fun surprise because you couldn't even tell it was red before.

New mail box up, house numbers up!

Just a little bit of muscle and it already looked 10x better, in my opinion.

Then we took to the yard. The grass wasn't bad because it had been being mowed but there were little baby trees growing up by the side of the house and those hadn't been taken care of. They were all over so we got most of those chopped down and in a pile so that the house, again, looked cared for.

Riley man loving his demo work!

One of the walls we were removing.

Riley man standing in the door way of the old living room to the old kitchen. In that living room is one of the rooms were the floor fell in, you can see clearly in this picture.

Part of the reason my family and friends told me I was crazy. This is the dirt in the "living room", haha!

Kitchen post demo. You can barely see that old original door and window frame!!! <3

Me working to remove walls to reveal the brick chimney I had found!

Part of the old chimney! Love these!

After taking a day break from the house work we had gotten a ton of rain so Riley and I returned one day to find the house mostly flooded underneath. Which was a sobering reminder to me why this house was so cheap, the slope around the house was directing water towards the house, water was getting in somewhere and standing there. Then the humidity from the evaporation is what eroded those floor joists and caused them to eventually cave in. I knew the pillars and support were good, you can see how solid they are here. But I had to find a way to stop the water from coming in. So I did a bunch of online research and found I'd need to close in all the crawl space vents and add a sump pump down there to drain out any new water that might get in there again.

So on our last day there working on the house we went to town and got the materials I needed to close up all the crawl space vents, except the bigger one for access. These vents were originally put on these old homes because back then builders thought it was good to have air flow but over time we have all learned that if not properly taken care of and when in a very humid environment, these vents do more harm than good. So I closed them all up with the hope that would be fix #1 to prevent more water from getting in.

How we left the house in early January 2015. You can barely see but I had put solar walk way lights around the big tree in the front (that I loved) and the walk way up to the front door. There is also a solar flag light on the flag pole.

We left there in January with this "plan", which I'll use loosely, which was to return to Arizona, work my tail off in real estate, save up a stash of money, sell most of our belongings in Arizona, trade my car in for a pick up, drive out to Arkansas and purchase a small pop up camper, stick it in the backyard and THEN live in that camper while we finished the work on the house.

Reality set in about a month later as I had made arrangements with the seller to do a seller financing deal and pay LARGE monthly sums to have the note paid off within a year. Since the property was so damaged and also so cheap, no lender would even think about doing a loan on it. I couldn't even get contractors insurance on the place...it was that bad, lol! So we're back in Arizona and those next few months turned out to be seriously the worst in my entire real estate career. It was a little slow but then on top of that I had the team member working with me and sharing commissions and THEN we had a deal cancel. And then another one cancelled...and then another. I went from December to April with no paycheck. I'm not even sure now, looking back, how I managed to stay afloat. My Mom was a tremendous help financially, doing all she could to help from afar and thankfully with us still rooming with Chad our costs were super low. So we didn't have or get anything we didn't need, we just survived, barely. 

During this time I had a real hard time meeting that commitment I'd made on the Arkansas house but they were flexible with me and we changed the terms and I kept the house. All the while wishing it was even barely livable and I'd move out there in a heart beat. That one large payment on that house we couldn't live in got to be rather daunting and down right frustrating. To pay for something you can't use, live in or even sell! 

So around May I started reaching out to fellow investors because with some long thought I had concluded my best way to get out of the mess of that house in Arkansas I couldn't live in would have to be to cut my losses and change the plan to MOVE there and to finish flipping it and sell it for profit. So the plan was rather modified from my dream home to scaling back and completing all the work that needed to be done. And rather than changing it from a 3 bedroom to a 2 bedroom with an office, I changed the plan back to a 3 bedroom to make it something more appealing for the buyer's market. I put together a big presentation with plans, diagrams, photos, interactive floor plans, budgets and spreadsheets, etc. I reached out to a few investors I knew and nobody did flip properties in Arkansas so that wasn't helpful. 

Right around this time, in Arizona, a good friend of mine who lived in Maricopa (where I had lived for 6 years previous to moving with my ex-fiance the fall before) had a huge house and nobody to live in it with him and he worked away from home out of state for at least a week or two out of the month. He knew my situation and knew that I'd love to get back to Maricopa, out of Chad's house, move on with my life but that I needed another roommate situation while I was getting things in order. So when we talked about this idea of me and Riley being his roommates, he thought about it for a bit and then agreed. So within about a week or so we moved back to Maricopa. We moved in early May, Riley just had a few weeks to finish out school there in one of his old schools to wrap up 5th grade. 

So as of May/June 2015, that's where we were in life. Back in Maricopa, near good friends, 90% of our stuff in storage still and real estate business on an upswing (which was great, finally)! So that meant, no plans or time for a new plan!

XoXo,

Elizabeth