April - July 2020 - How We got The Whimsy Dome From Listing to Move in Date!

My name is Camille and here are some of the stories from Sean, Ozzy and I. This story starts the day our lives changed course like many others on and after March 17th, 2020. When your future looks uncertain, that is the perfect time to start dreaming and designing the life you wish to live. 

To give you some context, Sean, Ozzy, and I were living in Champlin, MN at the time.  I was full-time personal training at Snap Fitness Anoka and Sean worked for Oak Ridge Auto Body. On March 17th, the world shut down and I was without a job. I planned on coming back to the gym when everything opened back up, but the first shut down of 2 weeks for the non-essential workforce turned into 4 weeks, then 6 weeks then I had no idea when this time would finally end and the gym would open up again. This left my future uncertain but with plenty of time to sit in my happy chair that hung from the original whimsy tree and dream about the life that we wanted to create together.

Sunday, April 26th

Sean showed me many listings as we had been passively looking for a home for the past 8 months or so. My plan wasn't to move until spring of 2021. In fact, we had resigned our lease in March for another year! We wanted to stay one more year to grow our careers and save up money for a down payment. But when we saw the listing for this house,  I HAD to take a look at it seriously. It was the coolest house I'd ever seen, its price was within our range, and the location was within an hour of my entire family and only 20 minutes from the closest Walmart. I grew up in Oconto so I knew that Marinette & Menominee would be big enough of a city for Sean and me to find jobs in. This house was perfect for us. We joked saying that the only thing that could make this place even better would be a greenhouse. Sean and I didn't want to live in the city forever, we wanted to have more land and live closer to family (either one). I loved the idea of being able to grow more of the food that I ate and be closer to nature living that slower pace of life. I got a sweet taste of the slower pace of life when I lived in Spain and everything they do is lenta...... there wasn't the constant fast pace stress and pressure that came with living in a city.

Monday, April 27th

Mady tagged us in some photos on Facebook that morning and said look, more photos! My jaw just dropped, it had a greenhouse, a massive beautiful one! I knew we HAD to move fast and hard if we wanted this house to be ours. I gathered all the documents for Sean to get pre-approved and we set out to find a real estate agent and get our offer submitted! 

Wednesday, April 29th

We had our offer submitted along with our offer letter! We submitted their asking price and waited anxiously until Thursday. Holy crap, we would find out tomorrow if our lives were going to change forever. This was a BIG move to put an offer in on a house site un-seen, especially one this unique, but we had to try

Thursday, April 30th

We heard the news that there were 4 offers submitted on the house the same day, one even came in higher than ours. Our offer letter showed how we intend to live in the home and I believe helped us to stand out because WE GOT ACCEPTED! (after we gladly matched the higher offer). We then set out to start aligning our future!

May 1st - 22nd

We needed to get out of our current lease, find jobs in the new city, and find a bank that would loan to Sean. I was unemployed at the time so I knew they wouldn't be able to consider me on the purchase. We broke our lease and found new tenants for June 1st. This wasn't going to be much of a problem because our expected closing date was June 5th so we could just stay with my parents for 5 days and be on our way to our merry home. ( LOL I WISH!) We also spent this time thinning out our belongings and selling what we could on Facebook marketplace. 

Also during this time, Sean got a shard of metal stuck in his eye(he was even wearing safety glasses!) and my computer broke and had to buy a new one! Never a dull moment.

Friday, May 22nd

I get a letter handed to me at 4:30pm on Friday afternoon letting me know that I wasn't going to be able to use my DRIVEWAY or ROAD starting Tuesday 26th-Monday June 3rd. This meant that we would have to have our entire house emptied TODAY. We were planning on moving out the last weekend in May, but that would mean we wouldn't have a driveway and would have to haul our belongings down the street to a moving vehicle. We tried to drive Sean '53 Willys truck but broke down less than a mile from our house. We then drove to c\Chetek (2 hours each way) that night to get the trailer to haul the Willys and the rest of our belongings. We got the trailer back around midnight and knew it was supposed to rain Saturday & Sunday so we decided to pack up EVERYTHING and leave THAT night. I will never forget the look on Mady's face when I went into her room at 12:30am and told her that we were packing everything now. lol

Sean took a cat nap while I packed our go-bags for what I thought would be at max two weeks of living out of our cars. I grabbed what we needed for work clothes and started hauling everything outside! My brain was on overdrive trying to foresee what things I would need until we moved into our new home. I felt like I was fleeing the country because it was the middle of the night and I'm trying to grab only what I needed. 

We had a flatbed trailer and no tarps and rain starting at 6 AM. It was a race to the finish line, let me tell you!! We are loading one box at a time and all of a sudden the garage door next to us opens up. It is 4am and we are blocking the neighbors' driveway with our trailer and he can't get out. We have to stop what we are doing and move the trailer, thank god we did then because we bottomed it out and it would've been terrible to finish loading then find this out! We got the big items on the bed and it was time to get the Willy's on. Sean knew if he could get it to run, it wouldn't be for long so we had to push the truck by hand and get it turned around! Thank goodness it's a light truck! We got it lined up and held our breath as he started it up and FLEW up the ramps stopping within a half-inch in front and behind. PERFECT PLACEMENT. It started sprinkling, it was time to strap up and move out!! The truck couldn't get wet in the state that it was in and we were also hauling our bed and sofa without a tarp! Sean took off at 5:30am and I crawled back in bed only to wake 1.5 hours later and do it all over again, but now for Mady. 

Saturday, May 23rd

Mady and Sabrina had the moving truck ready to go. We started hauling boxes and loading everything up. This went smoothly! I drove Mady's car behind the moving truck all the way down to Rochester. I was tired, but it was done. Sean unloaded everything by himself and came back sometime on Saturday. I think I did another 2-3 carloads that week as well dropping off everything that didn't fit on the first trailer!

Monday, June  1st

I started my first day of work at Bay Cities Radio. I'm sure you're probably thinking, Wait, did you just say radio? How'd she go from personal training to radio?

I pretty much went to school for marketing. I have a bachelor of individualized Science degree in Communication Studies, Spanish Studies, and Business Management. I worked for a social media marketing agency in Minneapolis for 3 years before I left that for personal training. I knew that gyms were still closed at the time so depending on full-time personal training income wasn't an option, so I went back to the industry I have a degree in. Just so turns out that Social media was the mass media in the larger Minneapolis market and Radio is the mass media in our smaller market. It was a great transition! Creative freedom and lots of flexibility. Sean was still working full time back in Minnesota so that he could keep his paycheck. He was staying with a friend during the week and would drive back to work Fridays here in Marinette. 

June 1st - July 28th

We stayed at my parents' house in Oconto until our closing date. My brother and his wife and children were also staying with them since they were building a home in Oconto. It was a full house, to say the least, but I am grateful that we all got to experience that chaotic crazy summer together, but boy was I ready for my own space(and to wear some different clothes & accessories!) after those 8 weeks!

The financial side of purchasing this house was a nightmare. Bank after bank after bank turned us down. We were new to the town so had no employment history in the area.  I was also unemployed so Sean was the only one they could look at for the purchase. This home is by far the most unique home I've ever seen which creates problems for an appraisal and finding comparables... It actually required two appraisals to get a number that we could work with and still make it happen. 

We finally got word that we had a closing date! It came in just two days shy of being the best birthday present ever! 

July 28th, 3:30 pm CLOSING TIME!

IT'S CLOSING TIME! In the morning, we grabbed our trailer filled with all of our belongings from my brother Riley's house in Oconto. We parked it at Seans' work so we could grab it after the signing and let the madness of unpacking begin. The closing was at 3:30 and we both took off the rest of the day! It was so surreal for Sean and me to get this home. The entire buying experience was an emotional roller coaster, but was so happy with how it all ended up! At times it felt like it dragged on forever and looking back on those days in between, it flew by! I am so glad that I was able to capture most of this moving experience and share it here with you all! 

Stay tuned for the next post about how the first week in the home went! (Not how I expected!!)

https://thewhimsydome.blogspot.com/2021/02/april-july-2020-from-acceptance-to-move.html