Home Sweet Home

It is with both great excitement and great apprehension that I come to announce that K and I have purchased a new home! Excitement over the fact that we'll have BIG CLOSETS (his and hers!!), a laundry room, and ability to park in the garage!!!!!! Apprehension over the stress related to moving and remodeling with a brand new baby. Although - I liken this experience to K's decision to tear our only full bathroom down to the studs the week before our wedding. No, we could not take a shower the night we got home from our honeymoon - but if we can make it through that surely we can make it through this.

We weren't really looking for a new home, although it's been on our wish list for a while. We knew we'd have to move sooner or later, and had pretty much settled on the latter of the 2 options. There are very few houses that come up for sale in our neighborhood, and when they do, a) they've either been redone to the 9's and are ridiculously expensive, or b) they're only 1,800 sf and haven't been remodeled since their origination in the 50's or 60's and are STILL ridiculously expensive. In the back of our mind I think we both realized that while we'd hate to leave the area, really the only way to get more for our money would be to move to the burbs up north.

Well. During one of my many internet breaks at work on Tuesday, I went to realtor.com and entered in my regular search for our zip code - 4+ bedrooms, 2,000 sf minimum, 2 car garage, and max price range. To my surprise, I came across a new listing that had been posted 22 minutes prior. It's in our same neighborhood, maybe 1/2 a mile away, and is nearly twice the size as our current home. So I sent the link to K and we spontaneously decided to go look at it that night...

We were impressed not with the house itself as it is a dump that needs to be completely gutted, but with the potential end product. I don't really have a vision for any type of interior design whatsoever, but felt good about what it "might" look like should we add our dream touches and completely redo the layout.

Enter Eddie - a friend of a friend who happens to be an architect and has his own design firm. I called him the following morning to discuss the potential and he encouraged us to place an offer to hold the house should we be truly serious about buying. So we did. And we won. There were 11 showings the day the seller accepted our offer, and there is a full cash offer that's been formally submitted as a back-up should ours fall through. Here's where K and I praise God for His timing and provision and the way things have all seemed to fall into place thus far.

Many pending items remain - financing, design, etc. We plan to stay in our current home until the new one is move-in ready, then hope to rent it out. In theory we could fix up the new home and live in it while we tear down and rebuild on our current lot like we've always planned, but we'll probably save something like that for when baby #2 comes around to maintain our track record of embarking on insanely stressful situations in the midst of big life changes.

Here are a few pictures of our new diamond in the rough....