The home must be your “main home“ for at least two years, or 730 days. Most of the time, being away from the home on a temporary basis while you are transient or itinerantly looking for jobs or a new home will not stop that house from being your “main home”.
Separately, there is a tax concept called domicile. Your domicile is your real and permanent home, it is where you have the strongest connections such as jobs, voter registration, vehicle registration, doctors, dentists, children’s schools, social activities, your church, and everything else. There is no single factor that determines where your domicile is, it is a combination of all factors. In order to change your domicile, you must not only establish a new domicile but you must also take active steps to abandon your previous domicile.
main home and domicile are not exactly the same thing, although they are related. I can imagine a situation where, if you took a new lease of an apartment effective September 1 and a new job effective September 2, and you started getting your mail in your new city, that could be considered changing your “main home“ for the exclusion, even though you probably will not be considered to change your domicile until you complete the sale of the old home. So the two concepts do not exactly overlap.
However in your situation, where you are talking about being itinerant or transient, and keeping your possessions at your original house, I would be comfortable saying that you are still using it as your main home.
