The story of moving our Ohio family to Oak Island, NC
During frigid, Ohio winters, Tyson and I would watch “Beachfront Bargain Hunt” and talk about what a dream it would be to live at the beach…At one point, we had an epiphany: we could become beachfront bargain hunters ourselves!
Tyson worked overseas, so his job made it possible for us to live anywhere in the world. We homeschooled our three munchkins (aged 9, 6 and 3), so we didn’t have to worry about transitioning schools. Yes, we had family and friends in our little hometown of Gallipolis, Ohio, but did we love living there and did we want to wait until our children were grown to follow our dream of living somewhere we actually chose to live…not because the military stationed us there and not because that’s where our roots were…?
We checked in with our wonderful Ohio realtor, Carolyn Wasch-Brown, and discovered that the fixer-upper we had fixed up was now a potential springboard to get us to our dream location.
The question was, where that location was.
We knew we wanted to be within easy driving distance of our Ohio family, which meant South Carolina was about as far south as we were comfortable going.
I knew that I didn’t want to be farther north than North Carolina (because I one of the top reasons for the move was to escape those gloomy, cold, Ohio winters). Besides those perimeters we wanted to:
- be as close to the water as our $ could get us.
- Have access to a gym in our community with childcare (we had been driving 45 minutes ONE WAY for years to have this luxury).
- Have a coffee shop (Again, the closest decent coffee at that time in my hometown was 45 minutes away)
I had recently photographed a wedding in Hilton Head, so we decided to start there.
As soon as Tyson and I drove onto the island we knew it wasn’t what we were looking for. It was an entire city on an island and our budget wasn’t going to go far there.
We stayed long enough to look at some houses and gyms and to make sure our first instinct was correct.
We left there and headed north, knowing we absolutely did not want to live in Myrtle Beach and struggling to find other South Carolina options where our budget would get us anywhere near the ocean.
We ended up on Oak Island in North Carolina and, no, it isn’t the haunted one you might have heard about.
We had coffee on the island at The Flying Pig (which is no longer in business, but was a gem!), we worked out at Cape Fear Fitness in Southport where (at that time) they offered childcare and, best yet, we found our budget could get us as close as second row from the seashore!
This community had our whole wish list all within a 15 minute radius!
I, of course, fell in love with the most expensive home we looked at which was a new construction that checked every one of our boxes at the time.
It was exciting to find a place that checked all our boxes and, in an ideal scenario, we could live. But, of course, we still had to put our Ohio house on the market and wait for it to sell before we could move forward with anything concrete.
We returned home to Ohio, optimistic and hopeful, put the house on the market and got and offer almost immediately!
Tyson was overseas for work, so my mom and all three munchkins loaded up to head back to Oak Island for another round of house hunting. This time, we were ready to make an offer.
We arrived on the island during one of those magical times where a dense fog sits over it and you can barely see 20 feet in front of you. It made everything feel just that much more surreal.
After looking at another round of housing options, nothing could steal my heart away from that first house I had fallen in love with on our first visit.
We made an offer, it was accepted and about eight weeks later, we were loading up the U-Haul, critters and kids to move south.
On February 11, 2007, we were living the Beachfront Bargain Hunt experience for ourselves and began becoming the beach bums that we are today.
For more images and stories from our transition into islanders, pop over to Instagram and use #houchensbecomebeachbums.
