Selling our House Incognito: The Zimmerman Airstream Journey

It’s the start of a new year, and we’re well into our second month of full-time travel.

Each week, we’re getting to see new sights, experience new things, and create new memories as a family. I’m so glad we’re on this journey.

The further we get into our adventures, the more I’ve been sharing about how we ended up here, like how we downsized from 3,000 sq. ft. to 200, what our purging process was like, and why we chose to embark on this Airstream journey in the first place.

When we first officially decided we wanted to travel full-time in an airstream, we knew that this meant we either needed to sell or rent our home.

Rent or Sell?

Initially, we considered renting our home. It would take less work on the front-end, but the more we thought about it, the more we saw potential complications. We wouldn’t be local, so if anything came up in the house, we’d have to hire someone to take care it.

At the same time, in the summer of 2020, houses started selling for more per square foot than they had in years. And with such low interest rates available, houses were flying off the market.

Ultimately, however, it came down to the wise words of one of my favorite people, the incredible designer Jeremiah Brent. He says that you either love a home for the place (where it’s located) or the space (how it feels on the inside.)

When I thought about it, while I love my hometown of Conway, Arkansas, this town isn’t where I wanted to live for forever. And our actual home and the space inside wasn’t special to me either.

I wasn’t attached to the place or the space. So why was I going to hold onto a house that didn’t feel like a home?

That sealed the deal. We would sell our house, and when we were ready to end our travels, we’d create a new home.

Starting the Process.

By mid-June, our realtor was in our house, giving us a punch-list of things to do before the photographer would come take listing pictures the next week.

After walking in the door, she told us that it was exactly four years prior, to the day, that we closed on the home we were preparing to sell.

I felt assured that we were doing the right thing.

On that day, we asked our realtor if we could list the house without putting up a for-sale sign. We weren’t trying to be sneaky, but there were a lot of moving parts, and we lived in a small town. Word travels fast.

We didn’t know when our Airstream would be ready, when my downtown studio would sell, or when we’d officially hit the road. We didn’t want to have to explain our entire plan to eight different people each time we went to the grocery store.

The Moving Parts.

Before we hit the road, we needed to sell my downtown 6,000 sq. ft. studio, sell both of our cars, buy a new truck to haul the Airstream, decide what of our stuff we wanted to take in the Airstream with us… the list goes on.

And big life changes remind me of when I was pregnant with my kids. Everyone has an opinion about how you should do things and feels free to express that opinion without waiting for an invitation.

Now, I talked to a few full-time travel families about how to live on the road, but that didn’t mean I wanted a constant stream of unsolicited advice from everyone I’d ever known in my entire life.

Not having a for-sale sign meant that we got to avoid all of those conversations and spend our time focused on preparing for Airstream life.

We also had no specific date for when the Airstream would be ready, and I knew that if our house sold, we would want to have an extended closing period or rent the house back until the Airstream was ready, so we wouldn’t have to rent a place for a month or two before we got our wheels.

While I’m sure we cut down on the number of people interested in our house because we didn’t have a sign in our front yard, the people who did come to see it were seriously interested and willing to work with our unique circumstances.

And obviously it worked, because we sold our house, picked up our finished Airstream, and only had a short overlap where we crashed at my parents’ house before we left for our first location!

I’m not going to lie, it feels freeing to be completely untethered to a specific place. We have one small storage locker, my family, and lifelong friends behind us back in Conway, and just the open road and unlimited potential in front of us.

I’m feeling grateful!