Moving week felt like triage. Four days before the moving truck arrived, I was in the waiting room of the hospital contemplating how many overpriced gift shop stuffies to purchase for my middle son Silas, who was sedated for an MRI. My mind was so scattered that week.

Rewinding a few months. After four years in CA, Josh and I began to talk more about buying a house. By now we were in our third rental. Renting is very much a “thing” in the Bay Area, because folks are constantly in and out—not to mention astronomical housing prices. We actually enjoyed renting for many reasons.

We had owned our home in CO and knew we wanted to own again—but where? All we knew is we couldn’t make it happen in the immediate Bay Area, so we expanded our search about an hour in each direction. We felt it was time to CHOOSE California. A few small dreams began to grow: a bigger house to host family and friends, perhaps some land to let our boys roam free, etc.

Around this time our long-time friends from our CO days, Brett and Jenni, relocated to Paradise, CA to help rebuild—literally and figuratively. The community of Paradise and surrounding towns had suffered massively after the Camp Fire in 2018. A crazy idea came to all our minds—what if we moved there, too?

Our group text in early 2020 was just a lot of silly dreaming. Our friends would send us houses here and there, beautiful and in our price range. I dreamed about it in my heart but not out loud. It sounded way too fun to just up and move to where our friends were.

The craziness of 2020 helped this idea feel, well, less crazy. We wanted a modest piece of land with a house on it, and the more we searched the more we realized this was very much within our grasp. So we took the next step. And then the next. Suddenly it was happening. Right after we signed another year lease with our rental.

Now to tell our Bay Area friends…