March 22: We Bought a House!

I apologize for yet another blogging break...we were busy buying a house this week.  Well, we verbally agreed to buy a house.  It won't be official until we sign the contract on Monday.  And then it won't really be official until we sell our house, as our contract is contingent on us selling our house.  And it won't officially be official until we close sometime in June.  But the process has begun!

On Tuesday, we walked through the house that I was really hoping we would like.  And we liked it!  We love the location, neighborhood (it is a half block from a neighborhood pool!) and the schools.   The layout will work well for us (with three bedrooms plus an additional room to serve as a piano room).  It has just about everything on our list except:  the garage is not attached (but it is a nice, 2 1/2 car garage), the laundry room is not in a finished part of the house (but I have hopes we can make a finished laundry room someday), and the price was just a little over our budget (but it was close!). 

We have a potential buyer for our house also.  He walked through on Monday, then he brought his wife and parents through today.  They liked it, and our realtor said things were looking good.  But then later tonight she told us they were walking through SEVEN more houses tomorrow.  So who knows what could happen??  Let's hope that they pick our house!  How amazing would it be if we could buy a house (not yet listed) and sell our house (not yet listed) all within a matter of a couple of days?!  It would be amazing, and it is probably too good to be true!

So besides all this craziness with the house (I am NOT moving again for a very, very long time!), Audrey had her Easter Egg hunt/Family night at her school last night.  It was crazy with her whole school plus all their parents and siblings.  But the girls had a good time. 

Isla was eager to jump in and do all the crafts just like the big kids were doing.  That girl is growing up!  I just loved watching her and Audrey working on their projects together.

 The highlight of the night was the Easter Egg hunt.  Though it wasn't much of a hunt, because the eggs were just scattered around the gym floor and each kid got to pick up six to put in their bags.  But my girls thought it was great!  Isla was so proud of her bag, and Audrey was so excited to see what was inside each egg.

Speaking of egg hunts, our church is hosting a big egg hunt and pancake breakfast tomorrow morning, which I have been helping to plan.  With all the house stuff going on, it has turned out to be the worst timing to also be helping with the egg hunt.  But I think everything is ready to go for the morning, and hopefully it will be a great community outreach event!

March 18: Our House

We had a potential buyer walk through our house today...and he liked it!  He is coming again on Friday to walk through with his wife and parents.  We haven't listed our house for sale yet; this buyer is someone our realtor is working with and she thought he might be interested in our house when we are ready to sell it.

So that is great...as long as we find a house we want to buy.  But we can't sell this house without finding a house we like, as I really don't want to be forced to buy a house we don't like.  We are walking through a house tomorrow night that has huge potential.  I love the location and the schools are good (our top two reasons for moving).  It looks like it fits with almost everything on my list, plus I have seen some pictures, and it is super cute.  It is not listed for sale yet, but we have talked to the owners and it sounds like they are willing to sell it to us before they list it.  All of these things are good!  I just hope that when we see this house in person it lives up to all the expectations we have for it.
Daniel worked hard for the past few days to get our house in top selling condition.  It looks really nice!  The biggest project was our kitchen.  He took down the wallpaper, repainted the walls and the ceiling and put up new baseboards.  It really does look much better.  Here is a before picture of the kitchen: 

And after!  The cabinets and countertop really do need to be replaced, but at least it looks brighter and cleaner in there now.  It was amazing how much more light appeared to be in the room once we had the horribly dark wallpaper down.

 

The buyer wanted pictures of the house to show to his wife and family, so I took some today while everything was looking so nice!  

Here is another view of the kitchen.  The appliances are by far the best thing we have going on in the kitchen.

 I posted pictures of the dining room recently; there is nothing really new in here.

And here's the living room.  I don't think I have posted pictures of the living room, since we removed the closet door that used to be in the back left.

This is the downstairs bathroom, which we gave a facelift last year.

This is the office/piano room, which could be considered a third bedroom to a new buyer.

 

Going upstairs, this is the master bedroom.

And this is the built in closet in our bedroom.  (This was a huge selling feature for me in buying this house!  For an old house, it has great storage.)

And the girls room is also upstairs.  I cleaned a lot of stuff out of here, so it is pretty empty right now!

We remodeled the upstairs bathroom shortly after moving into this house.  I had to go way back to my old xanga blog to find the before pictures.  (ugh, it was awful!)  Here is what that bathroom looks like now:

 

And finally, the basement.

 

It was too cold to go outside and take pictures today, but if we end up listing the house for sale, I will have to add those pictures then.  

It's a good house.  I hope that someone will want to buy it and love it as much as we have loved it!

March 16

The girls and I drove over to my mom's house to stay for a couple of days.  Daniel stayed home to work on a long list of home improvement projects without any children to get in the way.  We have someone coming to walk through our house on Monday.  We haven't listed our house yet (because we haven't found a house we want to buy yet), but our realtor thinks this person might be a good fit for our house. 

On Tuesday, we are going to walk through the house that we like and have heard lots of good things about.  So it could be a big (aka STRESSFUL!) week.  When I was casually looking at houses for sale, it was kind of fun.  Now that we are seriously looking at houses and thinking about selling our house, it is not quite as much fun.  It's hard work to sell a house and buy a house and to get all the timing worked out with all of it.  If I can survive it all, I think I will be really excited about a new house...but it is going to be a long road to get there.


So back to today, Isla has figured out how to say Nana and Papa, and she just keeps calling their names out over and over again.  Braxen (our niece, who is one year younger than Isla) and Isla are big fans of playing on the stairs, so we found ourselves sitting around the stairs a lot tonight.  Here is Nana with all her grandgirls!

March 12

The sun was shining today, so I pulled out my REAL camera and tried to take some pictures with the light from the front door.

Audrey found some Easter baskets in our basement, and the girls have been having fun playing with them this week.  Isla likes to wear the basket around her neck like a necklace.

And she likes to play peek a book with the basket on her head.

She also likes to carry it around and put random things inside it. 

Look closely at her pants in the above pictures and compare it to this picture from September.  Same pants (size 12 months), six months later.  She IS growing, slowly but surely!

 

I tried to take some pictures of Audrey today too, but this is the best I got.  Crazy girl!!

March 10: Distracted

This whole house hunting/selling process has me distracted.  I can't focus on anything, and I just think about houses all the time.  We have decided that we are pretty serious about moving.  I just want to find a house and move already, so we can get on with our life!  We do have a lead on a house through a friend of several of my friends.  It sounds like a really good fit for us.  Probably too good to be true.  But I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

With all this distraction,  I am a lousy blogger these days.  I am really going to try to do better this week.  Really.  Stay tuned.

March 7: House Hunting

So for a while now, we have been thinking that we might want to move to a new house.  We love our house.  It is old and quaint and cute.  We have plenty of space here, and we live on a nice block.  So why move when we are happy where we are?  I have been asking this question a lot this week.

We do have a few reasons that a move might be a good idea.  And here they are!!

Reasons Why We Might Want to Move:  (in order of importance)
1.  Better schools.   I'm not super excited about the school Audrey would go to next year, so I really do like the idea of sending her to a better school. 
2.  A quieter and nicer neighborhood.  We do like our neighborhood now.  But our block is right next to a busy business street.  Our alley backs up to that street, which means it is not quiet around here.  There is a lot of foot traffic through the alley and on our block. I would like to live in a neighborhood where I feel comfortable letting the girls play in our yard alone.
3.  A place where the girls can have their own bedrooms.  This was a bigger deal a few months ago when the girls were not sleeping well together in their room.  This alone isn't enough reason to move, but if  we are going to move, I'd like for this to be part of it!
4.  A newer and more efficient house.  Our house is about 65 years old.  Living in an old house is starting to lose its charm for me.  I am freezing all winter long, and we pay a fortune for utilities.

Then, on top of those reasons, I also have a list of requirements for our new house.

Things We Would Like in our New House:  (in order of importance)
1.  3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms
2.  Price under $150,000
3.  An additional room (extra bedroom or family room) where I could teach piano lessons
4.  A kitchen with a pantry or more storage than we currently have
5.  A house that doesn't need a lot of upgrades
6.  An attached garage
7.  A basement
8.  A house with the same space we have now (around 2000 square feet)
9.  A laundry room (in a finished part of the house)

So, I am pretty sure it is impossible to find a house around here that meets all the reasons we want to move and all the things we would like in a house.  I know we are most likely going to have to compromise somewhere.

Last week, we found a house that fit with all of the above except for #7 and #8 on the "Things We Would Like" list.  It was such a cute house, it was in excellent condition, right across the street from a little park, and it was in our budget!  We put in an offer at the same time as another couple...but they went with the other couple's offer.  I am still really sad about it, because I loved that house and the neighborhood.

Now we are back to searching, and I am just not finding anything right now that comes close to the standard of that house from last week or to meeting all of the requirements on my list.  It may be a long hunt. 

In the meantime, we are trying to get our house ready to sell, which means tearing down the wallpaper and repainting the kitchen, as well as several smaller projects around the house and LOTS of cleaning!

March 4

It's been kind of crazy around here for the past couple of days.  We almost bought a new house!  But we found out today that we didn't get it, which was a bummer because we really liked this house.  I'm sure I will write more about this whole house hunting situation later, but I'm not feeling very long-winded tonight.

Mom and Marcus were here this weekend, which was convenient since we ended up looking at houses this weekend.  The girls were super excited to have Nana and Papa here.  Isla took a special liking to Papa, and even starting saying "papa" in reference to him.  I wish I would have gotten a picture of the two of them together, but I didn't.  Here are a few pictures of the girls with Nana though.