IT’S OFFICIAL: We Are Moving to the Hill Country!

As of this morning at 10:30AM, we have officially purchased our dream house in the Texas Hill Country. We will move full-time in June.

A year-and-a-half ago, we visited Marble Falls, Texas and decided we wanted to live in the Hill Country during the summer and the city during the school year.

This year, on New Year’s Day, a friend of a friend, who lives in Dripping Springs, Texas, asked us, “Why would you only live in the country during the summer? You should live there full time.” Our answer was “The schools. We want our kids to go to good schools. We also want them to have exposure to the things cities bring (Ex. museums, shows).” To which this person said, “You should look at Dripping Springs, the schools are good.”

Independently, Dave and I both started looking at houses. Without talking to each other, we both found the same house in Canyon Lake, Texas, on 12 acres, on top of a hill, overlooking Canyon Lake, with a guest suite (for friends and GRANDPARENTS), zoned to good schools (that are close to home), within spitting distance of not one, but two cities we enjoy visiting.

We fell in love with the house before we saw it in person and when we toured the house on January 7, we immediately made an offer.

It was a difficult, emotion-filled negotiation – the original owners built their dream house in 1983. The husband died a few years ago and the wife passed away in July. The house is being sold by the family estate, and the family is, understandably, very sad to see the property go.

If we could tell the sellers anything, it is that we plan to continue their family’s legacy and we will take extremely good care of the home their family members so obviously loved. We want to extend their dream and honor their memory. We plan to keep a photo of them in the house. They seem like they were awesome people – who loved the Hill Country, beautiful architecture, to travel, to garden.

The logistics:

• No impact to my job. We’re close to two major airports. There's high-speed Internet. FedEx delivers. Done.


• Dave has a statewide license – and his initial job will be working on the house.


• Violet is excited to go to her new school. We don’t think she fully understands that she will be leaving most of her friends, but we are trying to make that go as smoothly as possible. She keeps telling people she’s moving to a forest on a hill (as an aside, I’ve had to lie to several kids and families during the past month because Violet immediately started telling her classmates we are moving – to those reading this, sorry for lying to you and your kid like that). When she walks around the property she gets excited about “gliddering (glider-ing).” We’re still not sure what that means, but it involves wrapping a bungee cord around her waist and looking for a tree.


• David has been enrolled in Day Care (of which there are not many options) since January 10 (he starts in June). David loves the property and running on the property, which is why our first major investment will be a fence. (BTW, fences are hella-expensive.)


• We are going to sell our house in Houston. It will go on the marketing in March. If you're interested in buying our house before it goes on the market, let us know.

We will miss our life in Houston, including both of the kids schools, their teachers, their friends.

What about Houston? You guys love Houston?
We don’t view this as a move from Houston, because, we do love Houston. We also love our friends and family who live in Houston. Ultimately, we’re hoping some of our friends and family move with us – even if it is years from now.

We see this as a move to our “forever house.” We hope to live here for the rest of our lives. Well, until Violet moves to Paris (which she is insistent on doing), in which case, we’re totally going to follow her around. She accepts this and has agreed to be OK with it. (FUTURE VIOLET – it’s here in writing, no take backs.)

Seriously though, visit once, you’ll be in love (also, from an investment standpoint, the land is extremely affordable for how beautiful and convenient it is to two major cities). We predict this area will experience a huge boom over the next five years. There are too many good things going for it.

During this home-buying/picking up and moving to another city process, we’ve discovered that quite a few of our friends and family members have either already purchased land in the area or were considering purchasing land in the area. We can only hope to be lucky enough to have our family and friends join us.

On the down side, we may find that we hate country living. I’m worried about dealing with small-minded-ness, being deemed “the city folk,” not finding people we like to hang out with, our kids not meeting interesting kids…but instead of thinking about what could go wrong…

The house needs a lot of work and will be something we’re passionate about for the foreseeable future. Here’s a sneak peek of our new view (and the photo doesn’t really do it justice):


Don’t get me wrong, this could totally blow up in our face (personally, financially, possibly literally), but we’re going for it.