What I’d Tell You Before You Trade City Life for Land…

I get messages about this almost every week now. People tell me they would love to get out of the city, and then they ask how we decided, whether we regret it, what the hard parts really were. So I’m writing it all out here, everything I’d tell you if you sat down across from me and said we’re thinking about doing this too.

If you’re new here, a little of how we got to Tennessee. Anthony and I both grew up in Southern California, he’s from Fullerton and I’m from Glendora, and we first met in Claremont after we both graduated college. We got married in 2013, moved in together, and spent our first years in apartments, most of them in Pasadena. We could walk to coffee, we ate out more nights than we cooked, and we never once thought about a yard because we didn’t have one and figured we could always take Jadyn to the park when she wanted to play outside. We had started the blog but were both working full-time corporate jobs, so on our off time we would shoot outfits in downtown Pasadena and LA. Over the years building the blog then social media, it turned into a very fast-paced lifestyle, which meant events and shoots and enough travel that once Poppy came along we had a nanny to make any of it possible. It was a full life and a good one.

We bought our first house in 2020 in Pasadena and renovated it while we were living in it (more about that in this post here). A couple of years later we found another one in a quieter part of Pasadena that we thought was going to be our forever home, so we sold the first and moved into another apartment while construction started. Construction was taking longer than expected, so we moved into a rental house in San Marino that also had a tiny yard. Our “forever” home was still being renovated when we welcomed Elliott at that rental, and having two little ones now changed our priorities. I wanted to slow down and be with them more, and I was also learning to cook because I wanted them eating nourishing meals and not takeout all the time like we were used to.

Around that same time Jadyn started looking at colleges out of state, when we had always assumed she’d want to go to school in California, and something about seeing her want to explore another part of the country made Anthony and I start asking each other some real questions. If we could make an intentional decision about it, was Pasadena where we wanted the little ones to grow up? Or would we want to be somewhere we could have land? We had never had the chance to move before, we’d thought about New York when Jadyn was in middle school and couldn’t do that to her mid-school-year, and now the main reason we hadn’t moved was letting go on its own. Long story short, after contemplating it for quite a while, with our list of whys and praying about it continuously, we decided to move out of California before that house was finished. It was completed after we were already living in Tennessee and we sold it last fall. (I wrote the whole story of that here).

We’ve been here for almost a year and a half, and this is what I’d want you to know before you make a move like this:

Get specific about what kind of country you want. We wanted “country-ish”, because country means very different things to different people. We’re not in a truly small rural town, and we’re not trying to be fully self-sufficient the way I’ve seen other families do so beautifully. That’s not us right now and it might never be. What we wanted was land with a garden and (some) animals, while still being close enough to a city that we could get on a plane easily or go out to dinner or see a concert if we wanted to. Franklin Tennessee ended up being exactly that mix. Nashville is right there when we want it, the airport is easy, Green Hills with luxury stores is twenty minutes away, and then we come home and there’s nothing but our own yard and quiet.

We looked at other places first. I fell in love with Carmel CA and we thought about it for a while, but land there was expensive and there were enough restrictions on what you could do with it that we didn’t think it would work for us long term, and water was a real question mark. We looked at Dripping Springs in Texas and liked quite a bit about it, but the drought concerns were an issue, and if the whole point was growing food and maybe animals eventually, we didn’t want to be fighting for water to do it. That’s what pulled us toward Tennessee. Rain, real seasons, land you can plant in, and a city close enough that we never feel cut off from anything.

We found Franklin because of friends. I had been to Franklin once when I was younger, around thirteen I think, our family friend had moved there to work with Christian bands and we went to visit. I remember thinking how green it was, but it wasn’t built up then the way it is now. Anthony had never been to Tennessee at all. Then our friends Stevie and Sazan Hendrix were planning to move from Texas to Tennessee, and we were visiting them in Texas when they said wait, you should come see Tennessee, we just bought a house there! So we flew out that fall, and I don’t know how much of the decision got made in those first few hours downtown, all the red trees, everything so quaint and homey, but I remember walking around and thinking I could see us here. We came back a second time once we’d decided, this time to look at houses, and we spent part of that trip an hour outside Franklin looking at places with a lot more land. We drove away from those knowing it would be too remote for us. We also realized we needed to rent first to figure out which part of Franklin we wanted to be in, we still weren’t sure how many acres we’d want.

Rent for a year before you buy. If I could only give you one piece of practical advice, this is the one. We rented a historic house built in the 1860s on thirty acres, and I fell in LOVE with that property. But it was in an HOA, which meant there were rules about how often you mow, what your fence posts had to look like in the front of the house, and you couldn’t have any animals outside besides horses. That year taught us we didn’t want to be in an HOA, especially once we knew chickens weren’t allowed. It also taught us we didn’t need thirty acres, a garden takes so much less than that, but we still wanted enough room for privacy and for the kids to have space to run. We would have gotten both of those wrong if we’d bought right away.

The quiet will be harder than you think. When we moved into our rental on land here, I would lie in bed those first nights straining to hear something, anything, and there was nothing, and it was so dark. In California I had stopped registering sirens and traffic years before, and I guess I didn’t know how loud my life had been until it was silent. The stars were amazing though, that part I loved right away.

You’ll miss your old routine. For weeks it didn’t feel like we had moved at all, it felt like a long trip somewhere new, the kind where you’re still figuring out which grocery store you like, and then the last box got unpacked and I stood in the kitchen thinking, now what? Back home we had our coffee shops and our routes and ten years of memories around every street, and here everything felt like starting over. I missed my old routine until I got into my new one.

Your kids will need to un-learn the city. This one caught me completely off guard. At our rental house in California I had always told Poppy she could never go outside by herself, cars came around that corner too fast, and she learned that rule so well that when we got here, all that grass and her toys sitting right outside the door, she wouldn’t go out alone. She wanted one of us standing next to her. It took months of saying you’re okay, we can see you from the window, before she believed anything had changed. Nobody tells you that you don’t just move your kids out of the city, you have to un-teach them the city too, and watching Poppy and Elliott slowly figure out that they could run out there without us was really sweet to see.

Making friends takes longer than you’d like. We knew a few people when we moved but it all still felt unfamiliar. I remember thinking we have friends, we just moved away from them, and now we would need to be open to meeting new ones too. We kept showing up at the same places until we stopped being “the new family”. For us that was church and one little coffee shop we kept going back to. Our neighbors invited us to their Fourth of July party that first summer and I walked home from it feeling like we finally had people here, not just a house. We have our people now, and the funny thing is that once I stopped worrying about it, I realized how much I love a quiet night at home too. We have friends over and it’s so fun, and we’re just as happy when it’s only us.

You will lose a version of yourself. I wasn’t prepared for that at all… (the full post continues below for my Substack family)