Don’t Look Back

Last year, my husband and I received some disappointing news.  We learned that in order for our home in Bonny Doon, California (located in the Santa Cruz Mountains) to be covered by insurance while our friend renting part of it, that our home must be owner occupied.  One of us needed to return to Santa Cruz as soon as possible to comply with the insurance policy, if we wanted to be covered by it.  

The year before that had not been the case, our home simply needed to be occupied by another person to be covered, our friend living and renting a part of the house complied with those terms.

We’d lived in our Santa Cruz home for over 20 years and had just recently moved to Reno, Nevada a few years ago after the CZU lightening fires.  We made that decision based on our friend renting part of our house in good conscience knowing that our home was covered by insurance.   My husbands employer had transferred his working location to Nevada.  We’d transferred all of our records to Nevada, our vehicle registration, voter registration, doctors.  Reno, Nevada was now our permanent residence.   I could transfer all of that back to California, but as a married couple we didn’t want to live in two separate states.

Once making Nevada our permanent residence, we knew we had two years to decide to keep our home or sell it if we wanted to maintain the tax benefits of selling one’s primary residence.  However, after much sole searching we felt we’d discovered a way to keep our Bonny Doon home, if we rented another part of the house to another friend.  It was then that we discovered the changes in our insurance policy as we reached out to the insurance company to confirm our believe that it would be okay to rent more of the house.   

If we were looking for a sign from God, that we needed to let go of our beloved home and community in Bonny Doon, this seemed to be it.   Just as we received the bad news about changes to our insurance, I read a devotional from Christine Caine about Lot’s wife being warned not to look back, not to long for the life that she was leaving behind.

This gave me confidence that we were being lead by God to let go of our home in Bonny Doon.  I returned to Santa Cruz to fulfill the requirements of our insurance company by occupying our home there.   We shared the disappointing news with our friend who had been renting part of our home and reached out to his father, a friend and real estate agent.  

I began packing up parts of our kitchen and giving away what I could before returning back to Reno with my car loaded with furniture that had been my grandparents so that I could deliver it to my cousins.   We were relieved to learn that our friend and his daughter had another place he could rent despite the challenging rental market in Santa Cruz.  My husband and I returned roughly a week later and began packing up our house in earnest to prepare it to be sold.  We rented a storage unit in Santa Cruz to store everything we packed.  We began attaining all of the inspections that would be required by the buyers during escrow.  Our dear friends, who are artists, loaned us some of their artwork to help us present our home in the best possible light.   We gave away or sold anything we felt we wouldn’t use later.  I reluctantly parted with my longboard skateboard, much of my Grandma’s china, my soft board surfboard and so much more.  The purging made us feel a bit lighter, but it was hard not wonder whether we were making the right decision to sell our home, whether we might regret selling it later.

With the house mostly packed up, we were waiting for one last inspection, the septic, I took a week off to attend camp with my church in Mt. Shasta.  My husband continued to work on projects outside the house.  The plan was for our realtor to take photos of the house for listing on the MLS as soon as I returned from camp.

While at camp, I drafted a description of how wonderful our property is with the hopes it would attract a buyer that had the same heart for our property that we had.  My description far exceeded the 600 characters that are allowed on the MLS.  

All week long, I spent with people from my church whom I loved but whom I would be leaving to live in Reno.  It wasn’t until the night before leaving camp that the emotions of it hit me.  It wasn’t our decision to cut ties with our community; we were being forced to make this difficult decision by forces outside of ourselves.  If the insurance company hadn’t changed our insurance policy when they renewed it, then we wouldn’t be selling it.  We didn’t want to ask our friends to find another place to rent.  We loved cohabitating in our home with them.  I loved our friend’s little girl.  We would regularly get together to have teddy bear tea parties.  They hosted an epic bouncy castle birthday party in our front yard.  Who would want to part with community and relationship like that?

The reality was that our life circumstances were shifting and we’d already been floating the idea of selling our home the following Winter to avoid losing the capital gains benefit of selling a primary residence if we waited to sell it.  

Our decision to try living in Reno for time as a trial was working; however despite the benefits of doing so, it was still difficult to let go of the the life we cherished in Bonny Doon.  

Even if we chose to decided to keep the house for now, we would be faced with the same pressures to sell our home in the years to come.  Our aging parents, the risk of losing fire insurance for our home, the amount of work required to care for the property and the increasing cost of heating were not likely to change.   

As Christine Caine writes “I have found that if we linger too long where we’re not supposed to be, we’ll start longing for what we are supposed no longer be lingering in … It’s to procrastinate.  It includes another eerily accurate depiction: ‘To remain alive although gradually dying.’ ”