Changing Gears - You Are the First to Know

We Have Something to Tell You

We have been blessed in many ways.  Now we are in for a big change and  I have a question for you at the end of this blog.

We started watching YouTube videos and researching to see what the RV lifestyle would be like back in 2015. During that time frame, my elderly parents lived in the lower level of our home in Georgia so we could assist them.  They both passed on by the end of 2015 and we continued our research on the RV lifestyle and started looking at RVs for the next two years.  In 2017, we retired and decided to move ahead and take the plunge into the RV lifestyle and sold our sticks and bricks.  That’s a bold move, but we figured we could always get another house or just come back and live on the houseboat.

We were fortunate to find a beautiful home in foreclosure for a very good price in 2010 and lived in it for 7 years.  Although it was a scary decision to sell it along with my car and Dave’s plethora of tools and all our furnishings, we made a nice profit on it and was able to purchase our 2015 Mobile Suites and 2009 Volvo Semi-tractor.  We were off on to a new chapter of our lives.

I have a Real Estate license. But my main job before retiring was Quality Control in Automotive and Aerospace, and Dave was a carpenter and cabinet maker. Dave has a talent for fixing things and once owned a kitchen and bath remodeling company back in Michigan. 

We put on our Real Estate Investor hats and we were able to purchase several run-down, totally nasty homes over a few years on the cheap during the big foreclosure era.  One was bought on the Sheriff’s court house steps site unseen with thousands of cockroaches.  Then we fixed them up and rented them out for our income.  Over several years, we ended up with 4 homes and 2 condos.

Here is a few before and after pictures of Dave’s work on the rentals.

When we decided to go RVing, we hired a property management company to oversee our rentals.  We would travel for several months then come back to the houseboat for a few months and then off we’d go again to see what this beautiful country has to offer.  Of course, when we came back “home” to the houseboat, we’d do the doctor visits thing, perform maintenance on the houseboat, RV, truck or the cars.  And of course, enjoy camping at the islands here on Lake Lanier on the houseboat and hang with our friends.

A new chapter in our lives has begun 

We will be staying “home” and taking a lot less RV trips this year because we have decided to build a home and want to be here during the build.  We are both in our late 60’s and not getting any younger, so we decided we were ready for a solid ground home to come back to from our trips.  Once it is built, we are still going to travel, but probably not for more than 1 to 3 months at a time and take some short trips too.  We will still keep the houseboat for the weekend get-aways. 

The area we live in is 50 miles northeast of Atlanta and it has boomed like crazy.  Distribution centers, townhomes, apartments, subdivisions and logistic centers have sprung up all around us.  Traffic has become impossible.  The population in our area has doubled in 10 years.  All the wonderful tree lined streets have been ripped down and concrete and blocks are our new view. 

So, we decided to move forward and look for property further north out in the country to be able to have what we want…a ranch home with some land with trees, some privacy and a huge RV garage.  Since we haven’t been able to find this already built, we decided to look for property and a builder.

We found a few lots we thought would work, but either the HOA didn’t want an RV garage or the property was on the side of a mountain that would make most of it useless and make it difficult to put in an RV garage or we’d have difficulty trying to back in our truck and RV.  Then I came across a new listing of a 4-acre lot in the woods on a corner out in a rural area near the blue ridge mountains but close to shopping and restaurants and less than an hour from the houseboat.  It has city water, is nearly flat, has a little creek running across it and NO HOA.  Bingo!  It looked perfect.  We jumped on it and bought it.  It is so peaceful out in the country and there is a 10-acre horse farm across the street with a view of Yonah Mountain.  Even though it’s out in the country, a large grocery store is only 3 miles away and Walmart is 5 miles away.  We really like the idea of No HOA too.

Our corner lot:

It is located 7 miles south of Helen, GA in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Helen is a mountain tourist town and it is known for its vineyards and quaint Bavarian-style buildings with lots of shops and restaurants plus tubing down the Chattahoochee River.

Another thing we liked about this area is it is great for motorcycle riding in the mountains into Tennessee, and North and South Carolina.

Watts in the Woods

I have been working on a ranch floorplan for years on a free program called floorplanner.com.  I have probably designed 100 different plans.  In the meantime, we started to sell some of our rental homes to put the funds towards the property and new build.  We are still keeping 3 of our rentals.  So, we obtained a construction loan and started to check out different builders.  Several of them will only let you use their floorplans but you can move interior walls.  Then you had to choose materials from their studio even if you don’t really like their choices.  Then everything was an upgrade or an upgrade to an upgrade…cha-ching!  Bottom line, we finally found a small independent builder that had a house for sale and we liked the plan and quality of his work.  After meeting the builder, Shaun from Rocking Chair Custom Homes, we really liked him and knew he was our guy.  I changed his floorplan quite a bit, but we finally got it designed on paper. Like this which we want it to be "Farmhouse meets Mountain Retreat" with direct access to the RV garage.

2400 Sq Ft RV GARAGE

One of the main things Dave wanted was a RV garage/Shop that would hold the RV, the truck and have an area for a workshop.  We currently pay for two covered slips.  One for the RV and one for the truck.  Then also two more enclosed storage units for tools and other personal items.  Dave’s lift is sitting in one of them.  So, you can imagine our monthly storage fees.  The RV garage will take care of all of that. So, after some research, we choose BullDog Steel Structures to put up a metal garage. 

I designed Dave’s dream garage which will be 40’ x 60’ with a 14’ x 14’ garage door in the front and two in the back along with a Lean-too for the pontoon boat.  It will even have room next to it for an additional RV for visitors.  This will also provide him with a place to finish his Spyder lift, since our current storage unit has requested that we no longer work on it at their facility. We will also have an entrance and exit driveway such that you can pull directly into the RV garage and drive straight through to exit. That was one of the main reasons we liked this lot.

Dave will be building some of the cabinetry, making rustic beams for the tray ceilings, building some furniture from the trees that were cut down and doing other work for the new home. 

We recently broke ground, took down the trees for the buildings and brought dirt in to level the site.  We just got the home boxed in to get ready for concrete.

This is our neighbor's property across the street

We will be doing a video in the future about this new chapter in our life, but you are the first to learn about this.

I hope we don’t lose subscribers because we are not on the road much this year while we build our home.  We will still make videos of things that Dave does, the Spyder lift, Dude our new dog, the houseboat, the new RV garage and the new home build.

Here is my question to you:  Would you still watch our videos if it didn’t include our regular RV trips and crazy stuff that happens to us on the road?

Thanks for following us.  We really appreciate you.

Karen and Dave