The Waiting Game (July – October 2015)

With the estate sale scheduled to begin on July 16^th and the fifth wheel not expected to be ready until Labor Day, we faced the prospect of being homeless for a while.  Initially we considered subletting on apartment for a couple of months.  After looking at sublet opportunities on Craigslist, we gave up on this option.  We couldn’t find any sublet opportunities that were as short-term as we thought we needed and it would have required us to hold on to some of our furniture to furnish the sublet unit.  We also looked at furnished apartments but these were almost all owned by corporate housing firms and were very pricey.  Finally Phil found an extended stay hotel that was a short distance from our house, provided the furnishings we would need, and was reasonably priced.  We moved in on July 12^th to enable to estate sale firm to begin prepping for the sale.  We initially expected to be leaving on August 30^th.

At first the stay in the hotel went by quickly.  The house sale closed on July 24^th without too many last minute issues.  Jan continued working until the end of July.  Phil had a contract assignment that ran until mid-August.  We believed we were only a few weeks away from starting our new life.  Wrong!

In mid-July, we had been contacted by DRV and told that they were making some mid-year design changes.  However, they never mentioned that this would delay the delivery schedule.  Since we were still expecting delivery around Labor Day, we were surprised to learn in mid-August that these design changes had led to delays.  Our unit was now scheduled to come “off the line” on September 8^th but would then have to be sent out for painting and then delivered to the dealer in Knoxville.  The new estimated delivery date was either the last week in September or the first week in October.

We scheduled a DRV factory tour on September 4^th and got to see our unit in progress.  Although it was great to be able to walk around inside the rig, it was obvious that there was still a lot of work left to be done.

Near the end of September, we finally got a firm delivery date of October 12^th, three months after we had moved into our extended stay hotel.  On September 30, we made a quick trip to Nashville to deliver keepsakes to three of our kids and to put long-term storage items in a 5 x 5 storage unit closer to family.  We placed numerous orders with Amazon for things we knew we would need for our RV life and had them shipped to our son Jarrod’s address.  We returned to Schaumburg for four more nights before emptying out the balance of our storage unit, leaving Illinois on October 8^th and heading back to Tennessee to finally get our RV.