Moving and Motivation

As some of you know, my husband and I are moving. I really hate moving. Seriously, the packing, living with what isn't packed yet, figuring out what to pack first and what to pack last, where to stash the packed boxes (especially when we have a two-car garage, but that's where the cats are, and one is a chronic sprayer), the sorting and purging, the cleaning. I just really don't like it at all!

This time is a little different, though. Husband and I got married only recently, so there's a lot of yours/mine.. not a lot of ours. So the purging is very.. Let's call it gentle.

But there's a bigger twofold problem:
1) The house has to be sold and closed by January because of some things in his divorce decree. It's just gotta be done. But because Hus is in school, we want to stay until he's finished, which is a little less than a year. So we may have to find a rental house. Yeah, good luck with that when we have two dogs and three cats.

2) We don't have a "To"... Yeah, we're moving, but where to? Haven't figured that out yet. As we've talked, we've come up with three key gotta-haves, and if we could get all three within about a 50-mile radius (or smaller), that'd be a sweet spot!:

2a) Mountains. We both love mountains. As I've posted in the past, mountains = home to me. For him, I'm not sure his reasons, but I know he loves them, loves going camping. So there's that.

2b) Temple. Yes, as members of this church, we want to be near a House of the Lord.

2C) VA services. He's a 100%-disabled Army veteran, so being near those services would be super handy!

So that has us narrowed down to two cities. One city is in another state. And the housing market (real estate) is a seller's market. Houses are selling like hot cakes, and for a good bit over asking.... which makes it incredibly competitive for buyers.

The other city is.. well, we'd be staying in town. From what I can tell, the housing market is about the same here. *sigh.