We’ve been spending time with our families in southern California last few days. The holidays sneaked up on us this year and we are guilty of doing some things last minute and not even getting to some things we should have (like sending out Christmas cards).
OK, so here’s another last minute project: a video highlighting our major life events in 2009 and season’s greetings to you!
Summary:
After living in TX for almost 5 years, we sold our 4300+ s.f. “McMansion” in May and spent the next 5 months roaming the west coast, from southern CA to Vancouver, B.C.
Being “homeless” put our mobile lifestyle to the test – we put most of our possessions in storage, lived off a couple of suitcases, and worked on our laptops wherever we were. We even rented a mostly unfurnished house for a month in Mountain View while we visited our Silicon Valley friends.
We enjoyed spending time with many of you during our travels, which included several trips to mostly northern and southern CA, ranging from 1-7 weeks, as well as a week-long family boating trip in the Pacific Northwest.
Eventually in November we moved into a rental condo in Scottsdale, Arizona. It has been beautiful in the winter and we love the north Scottsdale area so far.
We hope you had a memorable year 2009 as well and we look forward to making new memories in 2010
While we were visiting with David’s parents in Long Beach for Thanksgiving holiday, David went on a short boating trip with his dad and brother Eric.
Here’s a video of the trio going from Long Beach to LA Harbor (with view of the LA Lighthouse) in the Riva 50′ (David’s dad’s boat). The weather and scenery are beautiful but be prepared for some loud wind noise in the video
It has been a few weeks since we moved into our rental condo here in north Scottsdale. We are about 80% unpacked and our furniture fits nicely, even though we “downsized” from our 4300-s.f. “McMansion” in Texas to about 1/3 the size (and much less wasted space).
See below for a 5-min. video tour of our new home. We’ll be here for at least 6 months (and enjoy the nice “winter” here in Scottsdale). Not sure what we’re going to do yet for the summer (probably not staying in Phoenix area).
If you’re in Phoenix or Scottsdale area, let us know if you want to meet up in person!
Shortly after we moved into our Scottsdale condo, we met with our business partners to tour a couple of foreclosed houses they bought at trustee sales. Here are 2 video tours where you can see 2 different houses in the north Phoenix area, one just acquired and one fully fixed up.
Home #1 – Desert Ridge House, Just Bought at Trustee Sale (Before Remodel)
Home #2 – NW Phoenix House, Fixed Up and Ready for Sale
As you can see, both houses are in good neighborhoods. They should both sell at a good profit for the flippers and investors. Now that we’re local, we can get more involved in this business.
After a few months of homeless roaming (mostly in CA and along the west coast), we finally moved ourselves (and our stuff from mini-storage) to a condo in north Scottsdale, AZ. We drove from Long Beach to Scottsdale in about 6 hours, slept on an air mattress for the night, then had the movers meet us at the mini storage the next day.
It took about 4 hours including driving time to get our stuff out of storage and into the condo on the 2nd floor – glad we had help! For the most part the move went really smoothly. The only major glitch is that we forgot to get gas turned on at our unit, thinking everything was electric. Then we found out there was no hot water! Oh, well, lots of cold showers until the gas gets turned on in a few days…
It’s remarkable how little we missed our stuff in the 10×10 storage (it was full with furniture and many boxes). I think we can go down to half the number of boxes and furniture when we move again
