April 11, 2021
"...are you kidding me?"
Th Red Barn Happy House began hosting guests in January of 2020. What a year to start, right? But even though the pandemic took its toll on reservations, and we closed our doors temporarily, we were still easily able to fill up the rest of the year with reservations from amazing people from all over our country who continued to give us high praise and all five star reviews.
From the beginning, we have sought to create a peaceful, welcoming, and 'homey' environment for guests seeking an escape from their day to day lives and the pressures facing them. This has been a full family project, as we have enlisted and trained our (adult) daughters & son to assist with the cleaning and maintenance, while giving them an opportunity to earn their keep. Win win.
Every single review that has been given to us has been saturated with over the top praise. So very thankful for all of the feedback, as it has propelled us to work even harder at "blinging" out the barn as much as possible. Well, it soon began to pay off.
On September 11th, 2020, the Wall Street Journal included the Red Barn Happy House in their article, even using our drone picture as the cover pic. Unreal. Talk about exposure! How exciting that was to be honored in that way--all due to a barn guest submitting our AirBnB as a possibility for inclusion in a co-worker's article. Thank you, Stephanie! And then later, on January 15th, our barn was included in an article in Thrillist entitled, The Best Airbnbs to Escape to This Winter Near LA. Wow!
But life has a way of changing things. For the past year, our family has been discussing the pros and cons of moving out of state, with the purpose of locating to an area where our children could more easily support themselves in the future. It's no secret that California is an extremely expensive state to live in, with crazy high taxes and other laws that are quite oppressive regardless of income. This discussion has become more and more serious the last few months, and we finally decided to bite the bullet and move to Tennessee, where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is here. Our ranch, that includes two houses, a tennis court, a swimming pool and spa, all set on 8 acres, was put on the market on Friday, April 2nd, 2021.
Though we will definitely miss running our beautiful AirBnB, we're looking forward to duplicating this out in the Pigeon Forge area, specifically Gatlinburg. And we're hoping on this end that the new buyer will see the beautiful potential of earning most of their mortgage payment by continuing to run The Red Barn Happy House.
Want to see our listing? You can check it out on Zillow, or find it on our realtor's website, and then you can also read about us in the latest issue of Ventana Magazine here. If you are interested, please give our realtor a call: Eric Baucom, 805-795-2001.
