I’ve always been a fairly introspective person and it’s part of my personality to seek comfort, beauty, and peace. But, like many of us, I’ve spent most of my life just passing through; falling into friendships rather than pursuing them intentionally, doing what needed to be done to get by in school and work, and constantly seeking distraction; through daydreaming, books, television, and increasingly over the past few years, social media scrolling.

Also, like many of us, my life was totally shaken up when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. I was living a very comfortable, middle class life. Married, no kids but devoted dog mom, home-owner, self-employed. My husband, Will, had a stressful but well-paying job and my income from meeting planning covered Christmas, two vacations a year, and our retirement contribution. I was happy.

Will, it turns out, was not. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy his job in mechanical sales – he got to be out among people all day, solving problems in manufacturing plants around his territory, listening to audiobooks and podcasts on the drive – but he wasn’t thriving. We knew this pre-covid. In fact, we spent all of 2019 saving up so that in the summer of 2020 he could quit his job and we could backpack around Europe for a few months. He was very good at his job, so we figured he could find another fairly easily when we returned. The idea was just to take a break and then re-resign ourselves to the trudging career march to retirement.

But Covid had other plans. I remember sitting at the computer, comparing the price to fly to London or Italy to start our trek, turning to my husband and saying “but maybe we should hold off buying for a couple of weeks- this corona thing is getting kinda big over there.” Two days later it was declared a pandemic. Two months later, after a short furlough from his sales job and an increasing frustration at being asked to do his, normally very active and invovled job, from behind a desk, my husband quit.

My dad started a consulting firm a few years back and Will had been doing some work on the side for him for a little while and when a full time position was needed, Will jumped for it. And suddenly, for the first time in our relationship, we could both work from anywhere in the world, as long as we had an internet connection and cell service (we’ve actually put that to the test this past month, and discovered with wifi-calling we don’t actually need the cell service).

So, we packed up the dog and the car and drove to Boise, Idaho. (Why Boise? you ask – check it out! It’s a beautiful city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains!) We rented an airbnb there for a month and our eyes were opened. This was fantastic. We could work form anywhere! We started day-dreaming about where we would go next. But it’s rather expensive to pay a mortgage on a big house back home and pay to rent a furnished house somewhere else for a month.

I give all the credit to Will. He’s quite good at “how”. Give him a how question and he can’t stop thinking about it until he’s come up with an answer. And his answers are often quite creative.

In this case, he cycled home from the co-working space in Boise and presented me with his computer, opened to a zillow listing back in Nashville. “They just dropped the price by $50,000.” he said, as if this was the news we’d been waiting for.

This is the listing he showed me:

A four bedroom, 3.5 bathroom monstrocity on a major road, surrounded by overgrown landscaping and a garage-turned-florida-room-turned-barber-shop (what even?) in the back. You’re not surprised they had to drop the price by $50K are you?

“Hear me out” he said, anticipating my negative reaction before I could even formulate the best words to reject this idea of his. “What if-” Oh dear, ‘what if’ is probably Will’s favorite question. Nothing nice and easy and pleasant ever comes after ‘what if’. I’ll give you some ringers from the past: ‘what if we planned our wedding in just three months?’ ‘what if we did a 50 mile hike for our honeymoon?’ ‘what if we made an offer on this house in Nashville without seeing it in person?’ (no, not this house, this would be the 2nd time we bought a house sight-unseen. I don’t recommend it, although we just did it for a third time, so I guess it’s worked out for us)

You get the idea.

“What if we renovated the whole thing, turned the barber shop into an apartment and lived in that while we rented the main house out?”

Huh. Well. That’s not an idea I would’ve come up with myself. At all. But, it would be a door opener.

You know what I’m talking about; those fleeting thoughts that, yes, usually start with ‘what if’. Those ideas that we typically recognize for the opportunity they would create but then immediately dismiss as being too far-fetched, too difficult, requiring of too much sacrifice.

Remember how I told you Will was very good at the ‘how’ questions? Yeah, he doesn’t shy away from those door opener ideas. He leans into them, chases after them merrily, and mulls them over in his mind until the ‘how’ is so obvious that you’d be a fool to walk away from the opportunity.

I scoffed and that’s as far as the conversation went that night. But he planted a seed. And a few days later, armed with the inspection report a previous interested party had paid for and then given to the seller (before backing out because it was such a big problem) and which included a handy little floorplan, I got on floorplanner.com and played around. How could we turn that garage-turned-florida-room-turned-barber-shop (what even?) into a comfortable apartment that I’d be happy to leave my 1200 sq ft, nicely renovated brick ranch for.

Here’s what I came up with:

The space already had a bathroom with a large shower and a closet with laundry hookup. In Boise, we were living, quite happily, in a 250 sq ft backyard cottage so the thought of downsizing to 600sq ft wasn’t as scary as it might have been otherwise. In 250 sq ft we had an armchair but no couch, and while we did have a separate bedroom, it was roughly the size of the double bed and not only did one person (me, of course) have to climb into the corner to sleep, but neither of us had a nightstand. I was also pretty confident, from my diagrams that we could fit a full sized refrigerator, dishwaser, and oven into the kitchen space.

I’m a very visual person, and seeing it, made me believe it. I showed my diagram to Will and he was sold. We called up a realtor friend and she drafted an offer from her hot tub while we hiked Goat Lake to temper our nerves.

We were blessed, I can’t deny that. And this was clearly a working out of the Lord’s Hand in our lives. If we hadn’t been saving up all 2019, we never would have been in the financial position to purchase this mess of a house.

It would be easy to type, “and the rest, as they say, is history”. But that’s the point, isn’t it. The rest isn’t history. This is the point where the grind comes in. This is the hard work. You can’t shy away from the hard work. And in a blog about curating an intentional life, about creating a life you don’t need to vacation from, it would be dishonest of me to gloss over the hard work, or pretend it was all instagram filters and movie magic that got us from this day at Goat Lake that we spent with racing hearts; a lack of cell service the only thing stopping us from calling our realtor and telling her to call it off, and me, one year later, sitting here writing this post from a cabin in the White Mountains.

They accepted our offer. Our inspection came back with even more problems than the last one and we had to re-evaluate our budget; find more money for the necessary repairs and scale back our renovation plans where possible. We got back to Nashville in time to close on the house, coordinated a kitchen renovation at the house (you’ve seen that picture above – I was NOT moving in to that kitchen, even if the appliances had worked, they were disgusting) and two bathroom renovations at our old house to get it ready for renters to move in. We moved into the new house on October 31, 2020. I dearly wanted to have a Halloween party – I wouldn’t have even needed to decorate to make it a haunted house! And the work began.

The phrase “dark days of winter” comes to mind when I think of the six months we lived in the main house. It was rough. For a solid three of those months, only one toilet worked, only one shower worked, and only one sink worked – and none of them were in the same bathroom! It hurt my soul to live in that chaos and not have a peaceful home to escape to. I fell into a bit of a depression and our marriage suffered. I did my best to create pockets of peacefulness and drown out the chaos.

I went to work in my role of “curator of family memories” (I can’t claim this phrase, I’ve shamelessly stolen it from a friend who embodies it SO well!) and led the charge exploring our new neighborhood. The dog and I found a beautiful park with a 1.5 mile wooded trail and we escaped there as often as possible, rain or shine, often bringing Will along after work. I fabricated coziness by playing Youtube’s “Hogwarts Great Hall Ambiance & Christmas Music” all winter while Will and I read Harry Potter out loud to each other in the evenings. I (along with everone else during the pandemic) went on a “Great British Baking Show” kick and made approximately one thousand gluten free choux pastries until I finally got them to rise propely. It took effort to lean in to the moment, to create memories in a desolate season, to feign excitement all three times Lowes delivered the wrong cabinets for our studio kitchen.

But the work went on. We hoped to move into the studio in April, but the renters we found for the main house couldn’t move in until May. It felt like a letdown at the time but in retrospect, we never could have gotten out of the main house before then. Another working of God’s hand in our lives. Another moment, where we feel the dissapointment of plans gone awry but see from a few steps down the road how the Lord was protecting us, guiding us down His path.

In April, we had a massive yard sale and sold everything we didn’t plan to take with us to the studio. In May, we moved in.

After six months of trudging through, it was such a relief to be in a place I could call home; to hang my art on the walls, to unpack and be surrounded once more by those beautiful things I’d collected over the years to define my space, to breathe fresh air, not filled with drywall dust and paint fumes, to finally, once again have a place I could come home to and retreat from the world.

The plan was two fold: rent out the main house to cover our housing expenses in Nashville and set up the studio so that we could rent it out as a furnished short-term rental when we travel to offset out travel costs.

There were dark days in there where we both found our faith in the plan waivering, but we stuck in there and saw it through to the end and now we are reaping the benenfits.

We haven’t been home in almost three months. We packed up the car and the dog again and drove back to Boise in August, for 6 weeks this time, followed by a week in Colorado Springs. Towards the end of our trip, we started talking about fall in New England and, on a whim, listed the studio for rent in October as well. Within 48 hours we had a number of really great people all interested, and 3 days after listing it, a girl from NYC, doing the same digital nomad thing we were trying out, had sent us her deposit. So we got on airbnb and found a cabin nestled in the White Mountains and booked it.

We’ve been here 3 weeks now and we keep looking at each other with wide eyes, a shared shock that we actually did it. That our plan, crafted on the porch in Boise, ID has actually played out like we thought. Now, the world is truely at our fingertips and you can trust Will to come up with some pretty crazy ideas for where we go next. Drive an RV to Alaska, anyone?

I find myself sitting here, red leaves gently falling out the window, bone broth simmering on the stove, dog snoozing in his bed, waiting on me to finish writing so we can go for a long walk, and I ask myself, how do you create a life so stable, so mobile, so intentional that you can lean in to all those little whims you have, those heart desires; how can you say yes to the ‘what ifs’?

This is what I’m muddling out here, seeking intentionality, meaning and joy in my days, craving spontenaity while knowing the value of ritual, routine, and rythmn. This trip has proven to be the first page of a new chapter of our lives, and I mean to treasure every word.