When my friends David and Jennifer Sawyer invited me to see their new home in Pender County there was no point of turning on the GPS… at least not right away. I didn’t need the voice of Alexa or Siri annoying me with turn-by-turn instructions.
I know how to get Hampstead. Some of my favorite golf courses are in that area. Turning on the app could wait until around the intersection of Highway 17 and Hoover Road. To me that’s where the town really starts. And so, at a red light, I typed in the address only to hear a rude message from a mechanical and electronic voice. “Your destination, in light traffic, is 28 minutes away.”
28 minutes? How is that possible? Hampstead is not that large? It doesn’t take a half an hour to get from one end of town to the other. Either the Sawyers were lying to me or their address was bogus… an example of government overreach where they just clumped every new subdivision onto the nearest post office.
Up until a few weeks earlier my friends lived less than 10 minutes from my house. Now I had to seriously question how much these relationships meant to me. Could we really survive? How can we remain close when they abandoned me for the backwoods, the boonies or the boondocks? How often would I be expected to visit them in Pondunkville, or the Sticks, or what some crassly refer to as B.F.E?
This is a story about change, but it’s really about how one family answered a question that many of us have been asking. If you live in the Wilmington city limits you’ve probably raised it several times over the last year. It comes up anytime a neighborhood sells their homes and gets more money than anyone ever predicted. You instantly wonder if such a figure is in the cards for you. It’s a nice thought, all that money, but the fantasy of new found wealth doesn’t last. Eventually your mind kicks into gear and you tackle the question that haunts so many of us, “Yeah…. But where would we go?”
“I was more nervous about buying our first home than I was about getting married,” said Jennifer Sawyer. “I always knew I’d fall in love and be a wife, that made sense, but being a homeowner just seemed like a real adult thing to do and I was worried about whether we were ready for it.”
Back in 2005, as newlyweds, the Sawyers bought a townhome in Wilmington’s Kings Grant neighborhood. It was the responsible thing to do. It gave them a chance to build up equity and to stop throwing money away on rent.
The property measured just under 1,500 square feet. The master bedroom was located on the first floor with two guest bedrooms and a small office upstairs. Back in those days they rarely ventured to the second floor. What was the point? Those rooms weren’t even furnished.
“We got it because it was centrally located,” remembers David Sawyer. “It was close to downtown, to the beach and to the university where we still had friends attending. We were the first one of our friends to buy a house. I was proud of that.”
And then life, as it so often does, got in the way.
The housing market crashed in 2008 and suddenly the Sawyers owed more than what the home was worth. The next year David switched careers and a few months later a son was born. When daughter Airlie came along in 2012 Jennifer decided to give up her teaching position at a local elementary. She would stay at home with the kids. In 2015 Ruby was born. Dave started his own business, a safety consulting firm in 2016. In 2018 the final child Maggie entered the world.
Throw in a dog, two cats, the kid’s friends coming over for the occasional sleepover, plus visits from out-of-town relatives, and the once spacious townhome was now too cramped and crowded.
“We out grew it,” said David. “And it didn’t happen gradually. It was like all of a sudden the place was too small. It made you feel trapped, both physically… because there was barely room to turn around… and psychologically because I couldn’t figure out how we could really afford what we needed.”
Sometimes the answers to the riddles of life aren’t solved as much as they’re discovered.
On a rare trip to Topsail Island, (typically the Sawyers were regulars of Wrightsville Beach,) the family car drove by a track subdivision still under construction. The neighborhood was located in an unincorporated section of Pender County, much closer to Surf City than Hampstead. They both noticed the wooded sign as it flew by at 45 miles per hour, the one that bragged about new homes starting in the low $300’s.
“We had probably driven another two miles,” said Jennifer, “And then out of the blue David turned to me and asked ‘What do you know about the school district out here? All of a sudden we were back in the housing market.”
They didn’t buy in that subdivision with the wooden sign. Instead a few weeks later they found another development, only a couple years older, in a gated community with all the family friendly amenities. Their new home is almost three times the size of the townhome. It has five bedrooms, a formal dining room (which they haven’t used yet), a two car garage, and a fenced back yard.
The yard was a big deal for them. They weren’t just home owners, they were now property owners with a small part of the Earth to call their own. But that brought on other concerns. Where 17 years ago they worried about having enough furniture, with this purchase something else was lacking . When they put in the offer the Sawyers talked the sellers into including a used riding lawn mower as part of the transaction.
“I didn’t even know you could ask for something like that,” said David. “But they agreed so we have got a house and a John Deere tractor on the same day.”
To put things in perspective, if somehow through magic, they could pick up their new home and transport it to a Wilmington subdivision, with a community pool and clubhouse, the average price for something their size would start about $80,000 more.
“That would have simply been out of reach for us,” said Jennifer.
Oh, they will tell you that moving to the country is not for everyone.
The price for a larger home is not just the numbers on a 30 year mortgage, the Sawyers also have paid by giving up a certain amount of convenience. They like to say that when they’re home now, they are home- like that’s the end of the day. There are no such things as quick errands to run. Nothing is quick about where they live. Everything is a task. If they forgot to pick something up when they’re out and about then it will have to wait until tomorrow.
But their kids no longer need play dates. (They go out the front door and down the street to find some neighborhood pals to play with) The dog no longer needs to be walked, he just goes out back. And their friends, with the help of GPS, will still come and see them.
“It’s like we can finally breathe again,” said David. “Each of the kids have their own room. We are breaking up a lot fewer fights… my only regret is we didn’t do it sooner.”