We're Moving!

We get the question, ‘you just finished your house, why are you moving? So let’s share...what we’re thinking, why we’re thinking this.

To start, let’s give you a little bit of our moving history to give you some context into our next move:

The very first house we bought was in 2008. We were young, had just gotten pregnant with Gabe, I was actually just about to have Gabe. And it was a stretch for us to do this house. It was a really big deal for us to be able to do [ buy ] this house.

Full disclosure, we’ve had a little bit of help. My parents gave us an initial loan that we used to be able to put money on the down payment and then we paid them back. We couldn’t have done it without them, truly. 

One of the main reasons we wanted to get into this and share each of our point of view’s is because we wanted to give you some context into how we’re able to go and buy an Inn. A lot of people have asked how did you do this or how did you get to this point and so we just kind of wanted to give our backstory on that!

A few years after being marries, we bought our first home. We did all of the work on it ourselves. It was the first house we ever did anything to and we lived in it for eight years. Dino never had any expectation nor wanted to move EVER. He wanted to die in that first house because it was big and spacious. Back then, before the trailer, we were homebodies. We stayed right where we were in our nice little house that we had fixed up and we were very comfortable.

Eight years later we bought land and were hoping to build a house on it. In the meantime, we bought a trailer to live on this land. The trailer was $8000 and we renovated it for $3000 ourselves. And our main thought was we wanted somewhere comfortable to live while we built our home. So we went from big, comfortable house, sold the house, used the profits to buy the land. Bought a trailer for a total of $11,000, to live on the land. And we thought, “oh we’ll live in a trailer and you build a house in like 2 or 3 months right? That’s how it works? Just like that, houses are easy.” Super naive. 

But no, after a few months of living on the land we realized that this was going to be way longer than that, it costs so much money to build a house, and the land that we bought was such sort of a money pit. We literally poured all of our money just into dirt. We got some really questionable advice and we trusted some people that we thought were going to help us.   

With all the ups and downs we went through it ended up being one of the best learning opportunities. If you’ve been following us for a while you know that us living on the land was one of the greatest things to have ever happened to us, because it pushed us out of our comfort zone, it pushed us to look at life differently. We got rid of everything that we owned to move into the trailer, and it was really challenging. And I like using the word challenging because I feel like it’s a word that produces growth. It’s not like a negative thing. So this season of our life ended up being a really good experience.

We lived in the trailer for 18 months. The reason why that ended was Dino got a job offer outside of SoCal. So we moved up north, sold the land, sold the trailer, sold everything that we had, and then started over again.

In the end we actually ended up losing money on the land. One of the reasons that we made the move up north is that we realized that we weren’t really going to be able to afford it at that point. It was going to cost a lot for us to build a house, it was costing us so much money just to prep the land to even be able to build. All of the money we had made after 8 years of being in our previous house, that we put towards the land, we basically lost all of it. So it just made sense when Dino got this job offer to make the move. And we bought the little Spanish bungalow in Northern California.

We were able to make this move because Dino got a job offer that provided the income for that. And we were planning on living there for a long time. Our posture since the RV has always been open hands, no grip on anything. We  were going to live there as long as God guided us to be there! 

In December  of 2019,  we both started to feel, a bit of stirring in us. We were both getting this gut feeling that God had some kind of move for us coming up. January and February we both felt kind of unsettled. So we kept praying about it, just as we have learned to do with everything else in life. Our main thing has just been to keep this open hand. Although we had just finished that house and put so much work into it, we have learned to keep that same mindset of "do you want to do something else with us?". Just keeping an open mind always.  

The vineyard house came up on the market and it was such a great investment property we knew we had to go for it. We were able to sell our smaller home and make a profit on it, which allowed us to do all of the renovations on the new house.The people that bought our home wanted all of our furniture as well, so it was the beginning of a fresh start... again. 

We started renovations on Chateau Petrone in March. Ripped everything out, and then everything happened in the world and we already had no walls, no windows, and we were like well, we have to keep going because we can’t live like this. If you’re new and you weren’t following along, all of those remodel videos are on IGTV so you can go back and see the hot mess this house was when we first bought it. But we saw the potential in it. And we thought maybe we’ll have another baby, this will be great to have more space. We really just wanted to have the property for other people. Not to have extra space for stuff, but to fill with more people. We renovated this place like crazy and ultimately ended up filling it with one person, Bob. 

In a way it feels like God kind of set us up pre-pandemic for us to have a cozy little spot to have our baby Fox in.

So where we’re at right now…

We finished this house a few months ago. We love this house. This house is basically done, we still have to do a little bit of stuff outside. But we are constantly in that mindset now that we’ve seen God work in us that way. We are content here, we don’t need to move anywhere, "but what do you want to do with us?" We feel like we’re ready to do something, but what is it? And we’ve just been praying about it, we’re always praying about it basically. But it’s that same feeling we got last December, like somethings going to happen, like a stirring. Dino feels uncomfortable in the calm if that makes sense at all. We thrive in an organized chaos. We like stuff happening, but also it’s good for us just to be still with nothing happening and sometimes I feel like God has us positioned that way too. Its definitely a balancing act of leaning into who God made us to be, and really listening for what He wants. 

As we were sitting in that waiting spot,  I had asked a girlfriend, Madison, who lives in Florida, if she knew of a great vacation spot. And she told me about a few places that were her favorite. Anna Maria Island was one of them. I kind of locked onto that one, I didn’t know why at the time, but now I know why. God was definitely working on something. Because a couple weeks later we were talking to Dino’s sister and brother-in-law, they were pastors in New Zealand, and they are moving back here and looking for a place to land. It just happened to be that one of the spots was right there in Bradenton, which is right next to Anna Maria Island. They know a church there that they had connections with and so they booked their trip to go along with us.

Throughout that month, when we planned it to be a trip about just going on a vacation, it turned into God putting on our hearts that we were going to move there. And same with my sister in law and brother in law. That push and that nudge to move there kept getting stronger. So we just kept praying about it, we don't want to make any big moves (literally and figuratively ) in our lives if God doesn't want it for us. We have no desire to do anything unless it’s in His will. But when we went there, we just immediately fell in love with it.

The feeling of God pushing us there is the biggest reason for our move.