Well, Hello There...

It has been forever since I've written.  June 10th was the last day, and it is now October 1.  So much has happened.  A few things have been...

We got our new house on June 21.  It was a filthy mess, and we spent the following week cleaning it and getting it to a point where we could actually live in it.  On June 29th we actually moved in.  We spent the whole summer painting, landscaping, getting quotes for various projects (like $16,000-$20,000 for a new roof... holy frick, 4000+ square feet of roof is expensive), and generally enjoying living back in "the city".  We wish we had never moved to the little farm town we were living in, and are so glad to be back in town.

Justin also started the new school year at a "new" school.  It's the same school he taught at for his first year of teaching.  It's been... interesting.  That's all I'll say on that.

My friend Jenn moved from our old town to our current city a couple of months after we did, and we've been getting together with our kids a lot.  It's very cute to see our boys be each other's "friend".  They even talk on the phone.  Not that they say a whole lot beyond "Hi!  How are you?  Do you want to come with us to the animal farm?"  But still, it's awfully adorable.

Finally, Isaiah turned ONE!  That deserves it's own post, and I'm sick and need to get to bed, so I'm going to try and bang that one out quickly now.  I really regret that I haven't been posting much since he was born, or AT ALL for the past almost 4 months.  I'm sad that I won't have those posts to look back on to remember what my kids were like during those 4 months.  But all I can do is move forward!

I leave you with our most recent family picture, taken on Isaiah's birthday...

Sigh.  I love them.

Moving Update

It's been 2 weeks since I wrote my last post saying we put an offer on that house.  In that time we negotiated a deal for the house, ultimately getting $20,000 off the list price (and $60,000 off the original list price).  On May 31 we listed our house for sale.  On June 6 we had an offer on it, and by June 8 we had negotiated that deal.  

There are still a few conditions to be lifted until this is all final.  We have lifted our house sale and inspection conditions on our new house, so all that is left is the finance condition (this gives us an out in case our house sale doesn't go through).  The inspection went great, the only issues were a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink that is easy to fix (owner will do that), a roof that will need to be replaced in a few years, and a little bit of normal chimney damage.  Our inspector (a carpenter friend with like 40 years of experience) was very impressed with our incredibly well built new home :)

There is no home sale condition from the buyers for our house.  The only conditions that need to be lifted are an inspection (not worried about that with a 5 year old Giampetri built home... if I were them I wouldn't even spend the $400 on an inspection), and financing, which they were pre-approved for.  They have until this Friday to lift those conditions.

We are hoping to get started on our financing asap, and close on the new house on June 21.  We want to have some time to do some painting and whatever else we can do before we move in officially, which we'd like to do before July.

If everything goes according to plan, the sale of our house is completed on July 5.  We are getting bridge financing for the 2 weeks that we own both houses.  If we could have we would have gotten bridge financing for even longer since after the initial $250 cost to set it up, it's only $62 a week for interest.  However, the buyers of our house want in quickly and we're in a hurry to move to our new house and get out of the small town where we live.  So we'll be doing a lot of cosmetic improvements once we're living in the new house.

So, that's the news.  We're going to have some pretty sweet before and after shots from this house!  It'll take some time, though.

New House?

We put an offer in on this house yesterday:

We knew putting the offer in that they weren't going to accept it.  It's $45,000 under their current asking price, and $85,000 under their original asking price.  It's also $105,000 under what the current owned apparently has into it.  But, it's been sitting on the market for 5 months with no offers.  It's certainly not in turn-key condition.  It's 33 years old and while it is extremely well built, and way better quality than any other homes in the area, very little in it has been updated since it was built 33 years ago.  It only requires cosmetic work, though, and after thinking about it for awhile we are confident we can get it looking very modern without spending a ton of money.  We'll just have to DIY a lot!

We expect them to counter offer much higher than our original offer.  We hope we can land somewhere in the middle of our offer and their asking price.  We will see what happens.  It's also conditional on us selling our current house (anyone want to buy it?;). 

This house is pretty perfect for us.  It's on over half an acre, and is extremely private (you can barely see it from the road) with a circular driveway.  It's a 2300 sq foot bungalow with a 2300 sq foot basement with huge windows like we have in our current raised ranch (so it's pretty bright down there, not like a normal darkish basement).  The basement was finished last year, but it's not completely done.  For example, a lot of the basement walls are missing trim; a possible bedroom is missing flooring, a proper ceiling, and trim; there is a new bathroom that isn't actually dry walled, they just put up panelling for the walls, etc, etc. However, there are three sets of stairs leading to the basement - one from the house, one from in the garage, and one from off the covered porch.  Pretty cool!

There are 3 bedrooms upstairs, with the possibility for 2 more bedrooms upstairs since there are two rooms that we wouldn't use for their current functions (a formal dining room and a sitting area, both measure 11x14 and have big windows).  We would just have to wall off the large openings and put in doors.  There are 4 bathrooms total, 2 full and 2 partial, but the partial one downstairs is huge and has the plumbing roughed in for a tub shower or even a stall shower and whirlpool tub.

The backyard has room for a pool, if we choose to put another one in.  It has a great brick shed, concrete paths winding through the trees (kids would have so much fun with that!), a big patio on one side of the house, and a huge covered patio built off the other side of the house (covered with the actual roof of the house).  It also has a bunch of pear trees that produce a ton of fruit every year! 

The biggest draw for us is probably the 33x33 ft garage.  That gives Justin almost 1100 sq feet to set up the gym, and room to train 10-12 people at a time INDOORS (which is not possible in our current 400 sq ft garage).  It also happens to be right across the street from the high school Justin has been transferred to for the fall.  And its 2 minutes from my parents house!!  I am so excited to be moving back to town instead of living 25 minutes away!

With us selling our house and negotiating on the new house, there is a TON that has to occur before we can actually call this home ours.  It could all certainly not happen, but I'm trying not to stress. We are moving to town regardless, so that's in my favour. And I am really trying to hold on to the whole "if it's meant to be it will be" thing. The way this has all happened so far makes me think that it might be meant to be. For example, we were not even interested in looking at the house at all because of the asking price and the pictures. Then on Saturday we were driving home from my parents' house and we saw it was having an open house. I was still not interested in looking, but there was literally 10 minutes left in the open house so I told Justin we might as well take a look. We ended up actually liking it and feeling like we could live there.

So, next, we decided to try and go to the open house on Sunday, which was from 1-3. It ended up working out PERFECTLY with Isaiah's naps, and that is hard to accomplish. Then our realtor wanted to meet with us at Remax at 4pm, which ended up totally working with Isaiah's next nap! He slept at my parents' for half an hour and woke up 12 minutes before 4. So we made it to the Remax office RIGHT AT 4.

Considering how hard it is to do things when working around Isaiah's naps, the fact that everything has worked out so far, timing wise, has me feeling optimistic.

But who knows.  Maybe they won't want to go low enough on the price.  Maybe our house won't sell fast enough.  There's a lot that has to happen.  Wish me luck!