Well, the news is OUT …we are moving to TWIN FALLS IDAHO!! My sweet family and I are making the big move next month. But before I share more about the new place and all those fun details, I figured I should first share how this BIG decision came to be. So let’s rewind about 5years back shall we?
We have had it on our hearts to move out of california for YEARS. Those who know us well have heard us talk about it at some point, especially the last year or so. Back in 2013 we went to the east Texas area and absolutely LOVED it. We loved the people, the area, the cost of living, the way of life, everything. For awhile after that Texas was always on our hearts on where to possibly “one day move”.. until this past summer. Last summer we started getting more serious about moving out of california and started really brainstorming WHERE. Texas was still an option, but we started considering other awesome places…and then BAM Idaho came on the radar. I’m not even exactly sure HOW we first started looking into idaho…but once we did we heard nothing but AMAZING things about it. So we started researching a little deeper.
We quickly realized that it surprisingly had MANY things on our check list. Our checklist being: cheaper cost of living, somewhere that is more in line with our morals&values, a beautiful area, awesome churches, etc!! The big one that really TIPPED us over the edge on being sold on idaho was the LOCATION. We LOVED that it had everything we’ve been wanting & hoping to find in a new city…and it was CLOSE! At least much closer than Texas and other places we considered. We loved the fact that family could visit more often as well as we could come back more often and people have the option to fly OR drive and not have to fly if they don’t want to. Twin falls is about 9hrs from here…as I remind my mom to make it feel not as far, it’s like driving to so-cal! Which most people in nor-cal do at least once a year, right!!??? 
Another HUGE perk of moving to idaho that really helped make the decision is it’s closer my best friend who lives in Washington!! We cut the time from about 16hrs apart to 8…which is HUGE!! I see many more visits in our future
So we narrowed it down to Idaho…but Idaho has plenty of amazing, beautiful places, so WHERE in idaho was the next question? We quickly narrowed it down to somewhere in south idaho. WHY, one answer…LESS snow, haha!! This cali girl did not want a lot of snow…I would pretty much die if that were the case, haha. South Idaho snows a lot less!! Like wayyy less. Think about 14inches vs 55+ inches a year! It’s crazy! Like a lot of people who make the move to Idaho, we first considered the Boise area. We had known people who have moved there and had heard wonderful things about it!! There are several little cities/towns surrounding it so seemingly you get the best of both worlds. But after researching more we decided that it was a little to “city” and busy for us. Too populated for US. We wanted something that felt a little more like Chico…because we love so many things about Chico!
Then we stumbled upon the little/big town of Twin Falls!! It is the next biggest city in south Idaho to Boise. It has 50,000 people…so even a little smaller than chico, which I loved! The more we researched the more we fell in love with Twin Falls!! The size was perfect. The location perfect. The beauty of the area was abundant. It may not have all the beautiful parks chico does, but it DOES have the most gorgeous canyon with the snake river going through it AND it has Shoshone Falls …one of the biggest water falls in the country!! So I think I can handle the lack of parks It has plenty to offer store wise…actually more than chico in a lot of ways and more than I expected! When we visited I was shocked to see it has stores we don’t even have (ahem, HOME GOODS & Hobby Lobby!!). I was pleasantly surprised!! Gonna be living in home goods after we move
From that point on we were pretty sold on Twin Falls! I started looking at homes for sale almost daily. Often at night before I would start editing I would browse homes in twin falls based on what we were looking for…but for a good few months I found nothing that truly captured my attention. And ya gotta realize, at that point we were “casually” looking for homes there…just to see what was out there…not necessarily to buy NOW. Because to be honest, it’s really hard to know when the RIGHT time is to CHANGE your whole lives, ya know?
Fast forward to the 2nd week of December. Let’s take a detour for just a few…it ties into the full picture I promise! As many of you know, we have been in the process of hoping to adopt at some point in the future. In early december we were in the process of switching from a private agency to the county. We had what we did not know at the time would be our first & last meeting to pursue foster/adopt in california. This would be the meeting that brought us to a turning point. This would be the meeting that encouraged me to seriously PRAY about which direction to go in next. I’ll never forget that day. I was driving home from an out of town shoot and had about an hour to think and pray about what the heck we should do moving forward. I realized we had two roads we could take. One, stay here and pursue the foster/adopt road and really DIVE into it (we were told now that we switched to the county we would be receiving possible foster children SOON if so). Or two, move NOW and pursue adoption in Idaho. Because we couldn’t do both. As I continued to pray on my drive, I received such a PEACE and I just knew in my gut what we had to do. It was clear: it was time to move.
Later that night my husband and I talked more about everything and we were both on the SAME page. It was time to move. I even jokingly said, “wouldn’t it be crazy if we found our dream house TONIGHT”?!…now that we knew for SURE we were gonna move. And guess WHAT!!!?? …WE DID!!! I was just scrolling online looking at twin falls homes as we talked and literally out of NO WHERE I saw IT!! The house!! This beautiful yellow charming home nestled on almost 2acres. I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes. We had been casually looking at homes for months and nothing like this home had ever been on the market. And it had just come on the market THAT DAY. It fit ALL of our check list items. A older home with character, hardwood floors, on some acreage and on the outskirts of town. How could it be!!?? My husband and I were both shocked and knew we HAD to look into it more.
The next morning I called the listing realtor. Left a message. Didn’t hear back. Finished my adoption class and called again. We just knew this house was most likely going to go FAST. It was one of a kind and a great price. I finally got a hold of her. I asked her all the questions I could think of to get a really good idea of the condition of the house. I also shared with her a bit about us and our story. During the conversation she also let me know that she had received 12 other missed calls about the house. In ONE day. There were 10 showings scheduled. I asked her if it would be crazy to put an offer on a house without seeing it first? Because I knew there was NO way we could go to idaho in a day to see it. After I got off the phone I talked more with my husband. After picking her brain on everything we needed to know about the house we were still so SOLD on it. No one had put an offer on the house yet & I had this gut feeling that if we were going to put an offer on it, we needed to do it TODAY. I just knew that regardless of how many offers it may get, if we got the first offer in we would have an advantage. I’m not sure why I felt so strongly about it then, but I did.
Within 2 hrs of talking to the realtor we got pre-approved for a loan (yes, we weren’t even pre-approved yet! I mean we JUST decided the day before to for sure move, haha!), wrote a letter about our family to give to the seller and decided what our offer was going to be. Around 3pm we put our offer in…without even SEEING the home in person. WITHOUT even visiting twin falls…EVER. It was not originally how we planned to do it at all, but it was all happening SO FAST and we knew we had to go for it!! Our offer was in and I expected for sure one of two things to happen. One, he would let us know he was going to be looking at all other offers and then review our offer later. I mean come on…there were over 12 other families interested… that’s just smart, RIGHT!? Or two, he would counter offer us, which we would not have been able to meet seeing as we were already at the top of our budget. But guess what happened? …NEITHER of those options.
The realtor called back within 30mins of us putting our offer in…the seller ACCEPTED OUR OFFER!!! Cue all the excited emojis here!! I was seriously SHOCKED. Was this really happening? I mean so many more people were interested. So many more people could have put other offers in. But still he accepted it. We were moving to IDAHO! I joke with people that at that point I think my realtor was more excited than I was, haha. I mean we had JUST decided the day before to for sure move…and now our offer was accepted and we were moving? It was HAPPENING??!! I was of course SOOO excited, I was just in shock and it was a lot to take in!! We were so thankful. SO so thankful. What was happening was not normal. Want to know the best part? More than having the opportunity to buy our dream home, the best part was that this was pure confirmation that we were doing the RIGHT thing. That the Lord WAS leading us to move and to move to twin falls. It wasn’t just a crazy idea in our heads. It was REAL. It was His plan. And we could not be more excited.
We called our realtor here in town and told her we needed to get our home on the market and FAST! haha. We were now in escrow on our new idaho home and ours needed to sell so everything could process through in time. We put our offer on our idaho home on wednesday Dec 12th, our home went on the market just 4 days later on monday Dec 16th! Keep in mind we JUST decided to move…so there was a little work to do…but thankfully not too much. We had a week of showings and received our first offer the 2nd day on the market! Meanwhile we planned to see our new home and new town just 5days before Christmas. Talk about CRAZY. Talk about BUSY. We drove 9hrs to twin falls and spent just shy of 40hrs there. It was SHORT. We quickly fell in love with our home, our land and our new town. I was surprised how it just felt like HOME. Everything about it. We drove home to cali and Christmas Eve and Christmas was the next day. The day after Christmas we planned to review all the offers on our home. In a crazy whirlwind and series of events we accepted an offer and our home was officially OFF the market and in escrow!! That was a crazy story in itself and one I may share one day as well 
Whew!! Are you exhausted just reading this?? I promise you it’s all been just as exhausting as it sounds, HAHA. But worth every minute!! So there you have it. We are moving to twin falls idaho!! We are moving next month around Feb 15th. We are so thankful for a 2month escrow. It has given us plenty of time to get everything done on both ends with paperwork, inspections, loan processing and all the other CRAZY stuff that goes into buying and selling at once! It has also given us time to process everything. To see people. To let it soak in. I am surprisingly not as emotional as I expected to be at this point. And I’m a pretty sentimental, emotional, horrible with good-bye’s person…so this is a shock to me , HA.
As sad as I am to leave everyone and everything we’ve ever known here, as time moves forward it starts to strangely feel less and less like home here. In my home and in chico. That has really caught me off guard to be honest. It’s strange to me that I long for a home and a town that I hardly know. But that’s just one more thing that I take as confirmation that it is EXACTLY where were suppose to be. It is the Lord’s plan for our lives at this point and we are soooooo excited!!
And to answer two last questions that I’m sure many of you are wondering, what does this mean for Katelyn Owens Photography? What does this mean for my business? I will definitely be blogging more about this as time goes on, but the short version is, I will be shooting both here in the Cali area and twin falls idaho! This year specifically, I will be coming back several times for weddings I already have booked. And in the future I will always book at least a few weddings a year here! I mean I have family here and any chance to see them and photograph beautiful weddings and I’m IN! I’m sure every year I will evaluate what my shooting schedule looks like, but for the time being this is the plan.
The last question I’m sure you’re wondering if you’ve followed our adoption journey at all… what does this mean for our adoption journey you ask??!! Well, we 100% plan to pursue adoption in Idaho after we move! We do not know exactly what that looks like at this point…but for now the plan is to get settled and spend the first couple months renovating and then pursue re-certification this summer sometime! I think I’m going to have plenty of things that I need to blog about in the future, haha.
So there ya go!! The news is out!! We are moving! And while we are so excited, we are sad too. It’s a HUGE life changing transition and I’m sure it will come with it’s share of joys and challenges. But I’ve learned through life that you never really grow when it’s easy…you see the most growth tends to happen when you are challenged and stretched, and that is exactly what is ahead. So I’m really for the GROWTH. I’m ready for our new adventure! And I’m ready to see what this means for our little family!! Thanks for reading this book friends! So much detail, it was hard to keep it short.
XOXO,
Katelyn
