We are moving on to our next big adventure – in Austria!!!
We visited Vienna a few years ago and I fell in love with the city. I remember checking into our hotel and opening the windows and I heard live classical music! Dreamy!! I loved all of the parks and the gardens and I thought, “I would love to live here one day.” I started taking German classes at Goethe in DC. And I kept telling people I was taking German because someday I was going to live in Vienna.
Fast forward to a few months ago and Chris and I were trying to decide where we wanted to go. Housing in DC is crazy expensive. The houses in Georgetown usually start at $1 million for a 500 square foot house that needs a LOT of work. And sellers usually get above their asking price. Some friends wanted to spend $600k on a house and they found one for $850k. They were trying to decide if they should just go way over budget to get this teeny tiny 2 bedroom 1 bath house in Georgetown. They decided to pass. A month later we were talking about the house again and I wanted to see what the sellers got for the house. The buyers paid $997k!
Chris and I looked at houses in Virginia and Maryland. We loved Virginia and didn’t like Maryland. But if Chris wanted to go in to his office the drive would be brutal from Virginia (his office is in Bethesda). We talked about buying a house in Pennsylvania and Chris could just go in 2 days a week. Then we talked about moving to somewhere else in the US and Chris could work from home. But we just weren’t excited about any of the cities we looked at in the US. So we started talking about Europe. There is a big project I wanted to be a part of in Vienna and I decided – now is the time (I will go into more detail about my job in another post) and Chris made sure his work was okay with him being 6 hours ahead. They gave him the okay and we gave our notice to our landlord!
We started cleaning out our DC apartment like crazy. Our Georgetown neighbors Silvia and Miles rented their house furnished. They moved in with just suitcases and a few household things. We realized they were BRILLIANT in doing this. So we decided to learn from them and find a furnished apartment in Vienna. We found the perfect place right away and rented it for 5 weeks so we could figure out where we wanted to live. Everything in our DC apartment had to go: kitchen stuff, furniture, clothes we didn’t wear, etc. I must have cleaned out 3/4 of my closet and easily 25 pairs of shoes. It was sad but these were all things I hadn’t worn in years. I used to wear heels all the time to meet clients in Orlando. So many of those shoes hadn’t been worn since I moved to DC. I donated so much stuff! We actually found some places that would pick up the donations from our front steps. We had three huge donations and the stuff covered our front porch stairs!
We then posted on our neighborhood forum that we had free furniture – people just had to come take it apart and carry it out. We put a lot of furniture on the curb and it was gone within hours. Our green couch was put out and we went to go get dinner. When we came back a young woman was sitting on the couch playing on her phone. James jumped out of the car and onto the couch with her! It was cute! She was “saving” the couch while her friend went to get the car. Her friend pulled up and said they had a pink and green themed apartment and this couch was going to be perfect! They asked James what his name was and they decided they are going to name the couch “James Green” haha!
Our neighbors in Georgetown were all so amazing – they helped us get so much furniture out and onto the curb. And the morning we left for the airport people were coming over and saying goodbye. The only thing we had left in our apartment the last day was our mattress (on the floor) and our suitcases. Everything really went so smoothly!