Timeline Tuesday!! Selling another Home (subtitle: Where is My Home?)

(Timeline Tuesday – some of the back-story leading up to our moving back into missions)

Summer 2013 - As we prepared for our next adventure of moving into missions we put up another FOR SALE sign on our home and small farm in Tennessee. Over the years we have bought and sold several homes. Here is just a quick overview for those who are new to our family.

 We purchased our first home in 1989 – Machesney Park, Illinois.  We lived there for 7 years as our children moved through elementary school and did lots of remodeling and upgrades. 

In 1996 (the year the pipes froze in some apartments we owned in Illinois) we moved back “home” to Florida and purchased a home in Lakeland.  We lived there and upgraded it also.

*disclaimer: some of these photos are scanned photos of non-digital film pictures

In 2001 we had the opportunity to live in a fly-in community (Howard's 1st through 5th careers being in aviation) – where there is an airfield adjacent to many of the homes and everyone had an aircraft hangar bigger than their house. We actually built this home ourselves - and while we were building we lived for about 5 months in a trailer - 5 people and 2 cats in a 13 x 65 single-wide that leaked when it rained. 

 It was an experience. 

We lived in the Southwind neighborhood for 3 years.  Becky graduated from High School while we were there, and as the college years began we realized the need for less mortgage and more college cash.

We sold that home in 2003 and moved to Whispering Pines – my favorite street name – and lived there for 2 years – Mike graduated from High-school and Becky got married. We remodeled of course and built a large detached garage.

We then had an opportunity to downsize and we moved back into the Southwind fly-in community where we had purchased an investment lot and built our “hangar-home”.

While living in the hangar-home everyone graduated: Becky from college, Mike from trade school, and Julie from High school.  In 2006 we went on a 25^th anniversary vacation and stayed at our good friend’s cabin in eastern Tennessee – it was beautiful – and we were ready for a change.  An opportunity came for us to purchase some land in the area and Howard and Mike took a couple of trips to look at different acreages.  We purchased our Athens, Tennessee 18 acres in 2007 and Howard built us our “barn home”. 

While in Tennessee, Howard went back to school for his Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling -  he had been discussing going back to school for over a decade – at Lee University. He graduated in 2011 and began working at a crisis stabilization hospital. Mike gets married to his beautiful wife at the barn.

  

Which brings us to the summer of 2013, getting ready to go into missions again, and putting another home up for sale. 

The home sold in a month which we had not thought about so we moved into an apartment - as we discussed this move later, we realized that in our married life we had never lived in an apartment complex.  It was an interesting 4 months.  

We only lived there for a short while. The process of getting to the mission field takes longer than we had anticipated and we realized it was more expensive to live in an apartment than to just purchase another small home. We decided to move to Chattanooga and be closer to our children for the year or so that it would take us to raise our support. That takes us to our little bungalow on Julian Drive.  We are, of course, fixing it up and Julie will live in it when we head to Lethbridge.

What will our home in Lethbridge look like?  

Stay tuned...

And while you are waiting...
Where is our home truly at?

                                 ...not on this earth!

Hebrews 13: 14 - For here we do not have an enduring city but we are looking for the city that is to come.

What comfort in knowing that no matter where I may hang my hat here on earth - I have a forever hat-rack in heaven!