Norfolk family use Instagram to share stateside relocation

A Norfolk family who found their “dream home” in the United States – and moved just before the pandemic – say Norwich will always be special to them even if it’s no longer their home.

In fact, when Angela Edmonds and her husband, Chris, decided to make the move to America, fate, it seems, was very much on their side.
 
The move took around eight months, from job offer to completion, and situated between Baltimore and Washington DC, it feels a world away from their former lives in Lowestoft and Norwich. 

The couple met as teenagers when Angela was “forced to get a summer job” at Chris’s family-run restaurant on Claremont Pier. After finishing school, their relationship became long distance, with Chris staying in Lowestoft while Angela went away to university. She specialised in textiles at Winchester School of Art and later landed a job in London. 

The plan, she says, was always to move back, but the idea of returning to Lowestoft no longer appealed. “I thought ‘I don’t want to live in Lowestoft but I really like Norwich’, so we bought a house, our first home, on Dussindale,” she says. “We were in our early 20s then. We got married there, had our children there and Norwich just became our home.” 

But Chris, who works for AstraZeneca, started researching further afield. He had colleagues who had been seconded to jobs in America and started to wonder if he could do the same. “He’d mentioned about moving and, at the time, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but over the course of time – I think it ended up being two years from when Chris first mentioned it to actually moving – I’d had time to get my head around it.” 

Chris’ research involved looking at potential properties online – including the one the couple would eventually buy – but he still hadn’t had a job offer. Angela, meanwhile, was working within the UK property market, alongside her sister, Natalie, who founded Frank Estate Agency.

“We were hoping America would happen, but we also weren’t sure whether it would, and Chris had got bored of our current home, anyway,” says Angela. 

“We put our house up for sale, sold it, but couldn’t find anything we liked.” They had been in a similar situation before, so they did what they’d done then too: they sold their house and found a place to rent.

“We were renting a chapel in Hempnall, which was beautiful,” Angela says. “A little bit too far out with kids, it turned out, but we kind of made it work. 

“Then a property did come up for sale in Poringland that we fell in love with, and they accepted our offer. 

“We were actually progressing through a sale with that, had surveys done and were almost there, and then all of a sudden Chris got a phone call: ‘America is on, you can get a job, we’d really like you to do it.’”

A few months later, the family booked a two-week trip to the east coast of America to scope it out. “We came over for two weeks in May 2019 and looked at schools, areas, houses.”  

Among them was the house Chris had spotted six months before.  “It’s extremely unusual to find a house and it stay on the market that long,” he says. “When we came for our two weeks, I knew we were coming to this house. It is Angela’s dream home, really, and it was just the look on her face – it was a picture.” 

The home was the only one that all four of them liked, Angela says, offering around 6,500 sq ft of living space, three acres of land and a pool. And, at the time, it was also empty. 

The previous owners, who had put it up for sale over six months before, had already moved into another property. This, Chris says, is quite common in the American market. “If you can afford to pay two mortgages, you can have two. People buy another house and if they don’t sell this one quickly, they’ll still have it sitting empty and still pay the mortgage. 

“A lot of middle to high income earners have two houses; they will have a summer house on the beach somewhere or by the lake, then they will have their main residence, but they will have two mortgages.” 

After some negotiation, the owners decided that Chris and Angela could rent the property from them while they sorted out their mortgage. 

The family officially made the move around three months later, at the beginning of August 2019, and around two months after that, the house was theirs. They bought it for $845,000.  

“The same property we were buying for that amount of money in Norwich – I mean, it was a beautiful home, but it was 2,500 sq ft with a third of an acre, whereas we got 6,500 sq ft with a pool and three acres,” says Angela. “We’d be lying if we said that wasn’t a massive pull.  

“Our neighbours had said that, weirdly, the market had dropped bizarrely at that time. When this house originally went on the market, I think it was $1.1m or $1.2m – within six months we paid $845,000. Our neighbours had said it was like a really strange time where house prices just suddenly dipped. I can’t tell you how this whole move has gone like clockwork.” 

Nobody could know, at the time, how the world would change over the next few months – potentially delaying or derailing their move entirely. “Talk about fate, because if it had been any later, Covid would have kicked in,” says Chris. 

“It was tough for the kids because you’re moving teenagers to a new country, then you suddenly have a very short period of time in the schooling system here, and then everything shuts down and you’re all virtual.” 

Finding the right opportunities for their children was also a big reason for the move, both admit. “The reason we came here wasn’t for work, really,” Chris says. “Work has driven us here but it was [because] I wanted more for the kids. 

“The schooling system in the UK, the high school system in the UK, is very poorly funded. Here, life revolves around sport and doing well for yourself.” 

Since moving, the family have settled into their community – and Angela says it’s no doubt helped that their next door neighbours, who have “taken them under their wing”, love England so much. Angela has also found a new job working for a local kitchen company, using the interior design talents she couldn’t find a place for in Norwich. She also shares regular updates of their all-American home renovation on Instagram, as @relocation_stateside.

But there have been challenges, too. 

“We were told that you could come here and your credit history and everything would follow you,” Chris says. “It doesn’t happen. 

“I couldn’t even get mobile phones because we had no credit history. We had to buy everything outright. I even had the electric company turn around and tell me ‘we’re not going to supply your electric because you’ve got no credit history, no history of you in the country, so we need your passport, we need your visa, we need a deposit’ and we had to give them a $2,000 deposit just to have the privilege of having electricity.  

“That was one of the biggest shocks – coming and having to rebuild. The first mortgage offer they wanted to charge us nearly 6pc, and people were paying 1.7pc. We managed, in the end, a 3pc mortgage,” – but not, he says, without the help of their neighbours. 

Construction and labour costs have also surprised them. Angela and Chris say that when they bought the house, they knew they’d need to do some work to it, including installing new bathrooms and a kitchen – but they say they weren’t prepared for the cost, around three or four times what they would pay in the UK. After three years, work is only just starting on their kitchen.

Ultimately, though, the timing was right – particularly now that people are increasingly nervous about the market.

Angela says she’ll always have a soft spot for Norwich, the city they married in, even if they don’t call it home. 

“Norwich will always be special,” she says. “Is there a better place to live in the UK than Norwich? I don’t know if there is. That’s where we did so much in our adult life – marriage, kids – but I do think forever is a long time. 

“Will we live here forever? I don’t know, but I’d like to have the choice.”

To follow Angela and Chris’ journey, follow them on Instagram at @relocation_stateside.

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