How did we get here?
My husband Tim and I met in 1981, the summer I graduated from High School! Thirty six years later, we have four boys ranging in age from 11 to 28! We own our own hardwood flooring business @Traditional_floors and along the way, we have taken a couple of chances and built two homes. When I met Tim, his family used to come up to Paso Robles, to go water skiing at Lake Nacimiento. At that time, there wasn't a lot going on up here. In fact, we pretty much drove straight to the hotel we stayed at, and then directly up 24th street to the lake. We never drove around or even ventured far away from either of those places.
It wasn't until some years later, that I even knew there was this cute park in the middle of the downtown area. As time went on, more and more wineries were popping up, and activities were added to the city calendar. Eventually Tim and I started coming up here for weekend getaways, without the boat. It was a short 3 hour drive from our home. We loved the area and started dreaming about moving here. At that time, our oldest boys were quite small and the thought was that we would all move up here. We were constantly looking at properties, but for one reason or another, the timing wasn't right.
Fast forward to 2015. After multiply times of trying to sell our house, with no luck, we got an out of no where email. Our house was not on the market, but someone was inquiring if we'd be interested in selling our home. We said "maybe"? The man, who sent the email came over to check it out. He said he loved it! Fast forward 18 months and he was ready to sell his house and we were ready to sell ours to him. It took about five months for him to sell his house, but eventually we sold our much loved house in the fall of 2016.
Along the way, Tim asked me "would you like to buy a smaller house here, or would you like to try looking up in Paso again and build ONE LAST TIME?" I quickly said "buy a small house here", which I think surprised the heck out of him! I said "well, the boys are older now, so the only person that would be coming with us, was our youngest, Timothy!" I would miss my family and friends that we had amassed over all these years. We are close to our parents, we have great friends and the area is great. He came back with, "well, Renee.....I think if we don't try moving up to Paso, we'll wonder if we should have." I agreed, but under one condition. If I didn't like it up there, we could come back and not go through the building process again (it's not for the faint of heart!), to which he agreed.
So we packed up all of our belongings, put most of it in storage in Paso and moved! We would go up several times, before the actual move, registering our son for school and looking for a place to rent. There was hardly anything available to rent and nothing in the area where our son would be going to school. SO, we packed up the 5th wheel and moved to a really nice RV park, for what I thought would be a short stay. WRONG!! Nine months later, we have just moved onto the property that we purchased in December!
In the past, while building we've lived in motorhomes, mobile homes and even barged in with my mom a time or two. This time, we had planned to purchase a property, and put a mobile home on it, while we built. Of course, that's not the way it has turned out, and I should know by now, that it never turns out exactly as we plan!! We have spent 9 months in the Vines RV Park, @sunrvresorts. If you're in town with your RV, I would definitely recommend either of their parks in this area. Clean, accommodating and very helpful! After looking at several older mobile homes, we both decided to just move the RV onto the property. I think that we both thought, we don't want another project to rejuvenate! The ones we looked at were quite sad and needed way more work, than either of us was willing to do.
We actually bought our new empty, nothing's been done with it, property back in December of 2016. It had a well on it, but that was it! No electricity to run the well or power the RV with. It took over 5 months to get the transformers installed!! Pretty frustrating, but we had plenty to do in the meantime. Get an architect, design plans, get plans approved, build electrical panels to bring the main wires into, grade a spot for the trailer, run water and electrical lines to the RV spot, and build a mini septic system! Our plans were approved by the county, before we got the electricity hooked up, so they have even graded and built the house septic system!
I hope you will follow along and see what is yet to come! There will be plenty, I can assure you. I look forward to the building process, exploring our new surroundings even more and letting you know how it all goes! I hope to find new places to recommend, and share with you what it's been like to move from the only area I've ever known, and starting over from scratch. Some of our friends and family think we are crazy. Maybe we are? Until we meet again!
Renee :)
