Well, it’s official! We are full time residents of Hatteras Island, NC. I grew up here, lived in Atlanta for 14 years, and finally succeeded in moving my family back to my hometown. Thank God for the internet that allows us to have city jobs at the beach!

My parents and my brother and his family live 5 minutes away, and they’ve been visiting and helping us settle in. For 14 years I’ve seen them only once a year, and this seems almost too good to be true!

We bought a house that has been a vacation rental for years. The house came fully furnished and the old owners had already moved out of the country when it sold, so they left all of their personal beach items as well. We have a couple closets full of beach towels, boogie boards, umbrellas, beach toys and even sunscreen!

Usually when you move, you move into an empty house and it’s chaos trying to set everything up while you’re living in it. We got to move into a house with furniture, dishes in the cabinet, and toilet paper in the bathrooms. It’s made the transition so much less stressful!

We are in the process of going through all the stuff in the house and deciding what to keep and what to give away or sell. It’s a lot of purging and organization, but it’s fun because I’m just so happy to be here that I can hardly stand it!

I’m working from home in the mornings, then working around the house as well. Today I blew off my house chores and spent the afternoon at the beach. It was an absolutely perfect day- still warm enough to swim at the end of September, a light breeze and turquoise water. This is why we moved to the beach- to enjoy it!

We have 4 dogs and we’ve been taking them to the beach as well, usually two at a time. My golden retriever is in hog heaven! She has even met dog friends!

It’s hard to express the amount of relief I feel that I pulled this off. I moved my family from a good, stable suburban life to a remote sandbar best known for getting hit by hurricanes. The nearest Walmart is an hour and a half drive. There is no Starbucks. This is an outlier community, with a very different set of challenges than we faced in metro Atlanta. But it’s home for me, and what a beautiful home it is!