Starlink made me sell my house
Today we review offers on our house.
It’s been a long time coming. We’ve taken steps in the past, but life events have prevented us from pulling the trigger and going all in. Then one day I got the email.
It actually took me a few days to decide to submit my CC information and buy the dish. Fortunately I work from my computer and my employer provides me a fund for office and connectivity type stuff, which this totally was. Once we got the confirmation email, life began to change.
Fortunately, I’ve been working remotely for ~6 years. When the pandemic hit, our lives were disrupted much less than most. My wife, Michele, is and had been a stay-at-home mom. We had been used to having the whole family in the house for long workdays with our two relatively young children. However, both of us having grown up traveling and adventuring, sitting in any town for too long was the real challenge.
We had been watching YouTube channels of folks, many with children, who lived and worked full time on the road in an RV. It really resonated with us. Visiting our friends and family across the country, teaching our children by showing them, and embracing a novel lifestyle.
We made efforts to take the leap, even while our son was ~1 y/o. I bought a 5.0 V8 F150 with a dedicated trailer break in anticipation that we’d be towing our home soon. Again, life happens, we didn’t go. Connectivity was always a major concern as that’s how we make our livelihood and I can be a bit of a workaholic.
Gradually, I tested out Starlink. I mounted it to the side of our Oregon house and worked off the connection exclusively for a few weeks. It worked! I could do online meetings, and code via my cloud dev environment, all while forgetting I wasn’t on my fiber connection.
We had been homeschooling since online public school had been failing my daughter during the pandemic. We learned to love it. My daughter was actually enjoying math for once. My son, being younger (~preschool), was off and running teaching himself numbers with passion and reading Bob Book stories every night before bed.
We talked a lot about whether to full-time travel or keep the house and get a small travel trailer for trips. We finally traded our Rav4 (which we had traded the F150 for when it started mysteriously misfiring) for a 4Runner. Then we bought a small Winnebago Micro Mini 1700BH. It fit in the driveway, we could use it for some trips, and we’d keep the house.
Then we did a week around Oregon.
Starlink worked, even if it took some finagling with the service location at times. We loved it. Sign after sign told us the time had come to take the leap and go for our dreams.
So here we are. Currently, in Garibaldi, a spot we love on the Oregon coast near our favorite beach access in Rockaway Beach. We busted our tail for a week getting the house to look fantastic. Starlink rolled out “Portability” mode, and Starlink for RVs soon after. This family of 4 plus Oakley (the dog) is gearing up for a full-time life on the road.
Selling the house will liberate us from some student loans and consumer debts and provide us a decent emergency fund in savings. So glad we bought the house in Scappoose when we did (2 years ago). We tell ourselves that if we don’t like full-timing, at least we’re selling while the market is high, maybe we catch a dip in a year or so after we’re tired of adventuring and visiting friends and family. We’ll see how it goes.
Update
The house is officially pending, it’s pretty much almost on.
