Moving time.

Time to pack it all up again. We owned a house in CT for almost 20 years, but a few years back after my son was off to college, my wife's job moved down here to Tampa so we sold our house and rented a place for a year. Then we bought a 2BR condo when the lease was up. At the time, we had just done so much downsizing and purging, and had come off of a long run of killer storms that ran through the northeast. We'd lost the better part of not one, but two basements to flooding over the years and were pretty exhausted from home ownership. So we were happy to kick back and enjoy the maintenance free lifestyle of a condo.

But another year and a half later, and we're really finding ourselves missing space! Two and a half years of having guests visit us in a small apartment, our son's large dog, and a bunch of other factors have brought about a complete 180 for both me and my wife, and we've decided to make a move back into a house. We currently live right in the downtown area, and Tampa is no different than most other cities. When it comes to real estate, you can find a lot more for a lot less when you head a few minutes out of town. So we'll end up looking in some of the towns just bordering Tampa that give my wife a really easy commute.

But it gets better - we purchased and renovated another investment condo a couple of months ago, intending to rent it out. But now that it's done, we've decided that the best and safest way to go about the sale of our current residence and the purchase of the new one will be to temporarily move into our investment condo. This way we won't be living in the house that is on the market, and we won't be forced into buying a house by a certain date because we've sold our current home. We won't run the risk of a delayed sale of our current home **** up the closing of the next one. Or if our current home takes longer than planned to find a buyer, we won't have shot ourselves in the foot by buying something else too early. Once this place is sold, we can wait for a house that we love to become available, rather than just choose from what's available at the time of the sale of our current home. Not to mention, the likelihood is high that we'd want to do some work in the new house, and living in a temporary place allows us to do that without having to live through it. There are just so many benefits to having an intermediate place to stay in between the sale and the purchase.

So long story short, we'll be moving twice, after having already moved twice in the past couple of years! I can tell you all with a very high degree of confidence that a 1200 disc vinyl collection requires 20 small-size moving boxes to pack......

I'm not going to unpack most of our stuff in the temporary place. It's actually got a ton of storage in the garage, so most of my gear will just sit tight in there except for the 5B's, my amp, and the digital stuff. I'll be going on a vinyl hiatus until we get to the house. We're at the end of the hot season in Florida. You wouldn't know it from the weather outside, but we're just waiting for the cold fronts to start kicking in and the humidity to plummet. Once that happens, we'll ride through May of next year in the 60's and 70's with no humidity. So the garage will be as good as climate controlled storage until we're ready to move.

The good news is that my wife knows that when we look for the new house, one of my requirements is a kick-a $ $ man-cave. I should end up with a pretty sweet new home for the SDAs once this all done. Once we track down a place, I should have a pretty fun project to work on - design the man cave!