Follow our journey

Hello, blogworld!

We are The Babers -- Chris and Kelley! I'll share more about us in upcoming blogs, but here's the deal. We are making some BIG life changes, and we need a place to document our journey! 

We know that so many friends and family (you!) are excited for us and have tons of questions! So we want to honor that and keep you all informed along the way! We'll share everything -- reasons and plans and things we learn along the way.

So, to begin...I'll share how these BIG life changes got started!

Chris is a dreamer...I am a doer. These differences cause us to butt heads every now and then...but they also serve us really well, too! We kind of balance each other out that way. About two years ago, Chris came to me with a grand idea -- he thought we should sell our house and make some drastic changes. Umm. What!! We had built and perfected our current home and it was an oasis! It was meant to be a place where we could put down solid roots and grow old. No no NO. I was in no way wanting to hear that! He retreated. Then he came to me a little later wanting to add a pool to our current house...I thought this was surely the ticket to keeping us in the house for the long haul! Yes, let's put in a pool!

You guessed it -- it was NOT the ticket to keep us there! For some reason, though, when he approached me again a little later with the idea of selling and downsizing, it felt right to me. I could see the benefits and the perks and the reasons. After a lot of discussion, we agreed. We would sell our house! It's definitely very important for husband and wife to be on the same page! It can sometimes take awhile for those stars to align.

Our reasons...we were both feeling nudged by God to simplify; to downsize; to have less stuff and more experiences; and to become as close to debt-free as possible. We believed that if this was something God really wanted from us, he would see us through it.

But then it became really overwhelming. We started a list of things to do around the house to get it ready to put on the market. That list was long and included some really big things, like fixing cracked tiles in the kitchen. Yikes, too much. So we sat on our plan for awhile. About a year, actually. We talked about it frequently, but always came back to feeling too overwhelmed. 

Finally, Chris bit the bullet one day and set up an appointment with our realtor, Teri. At least we could get her out to the house and she could tell us what we did and did not need to accomplish. Our meeting with Teri went great! She and her partner, Shanda, came out and looked everything over. They stirred up the excitement within us again, and down-talked our to-do list...even removed some items. They made it seem really doable.

And so...we got started on getting everything done and ready for the market...this step took awhile, but we were marking things off the list! Staining the deck; working to get the tiles replaced; touch up paint; hauling off debris; fixing some cement issues on the driveway and stone wall -- this kind of thing. Also lots of small things, too.

What came next was definitely a God Thing -- stay tuned for our next blog post!

The Babers