In the fall of 2010, Scott and I started to talk about potentially moving. Juliana was a year from Kindergarten and we were considering a move to a different school district. Soon we were looking at lots of houses and we found a few that we liked, but to buy what we needed it was going to be $$$ in our desired school district. We decided to wait to find out if Juliana made it through the lottery to the Charter School. When we found out she was going to the charter school, we put moving plans on hold.
A few weeks later, Scott’s mom called and said there was a house near us that had a price drop and it looked like it might work for us. It was in our same school district and only a mile from where we lived and slightly closer to Juliana’s school. I was firmly on “I don’t want to move!” because moving is so much work. But the next day we went to look at it – and it was a lot of house. There would be a playroom and an eat-in kitchen and a large living room. We went back the next day with my parents and soon after we made an offer. Between the original offer and the home inspection and the final agreement…there was a lot of paperwork. There were several points in the process where I was willing to walk away as we continued to find more things that we would need to fix; those were long months.
Two years ago today we moved into our home. We had closed several weeks before, but we were refinishing floors and painting rooms and moving stuff into the house little by little. A lot of smaller furniture, clothes, toys and the kitchen contents were moved into the house in the days before the big moving day. On May 16th, we hired movers to bring the furniture and appliances to our new house; the cribs and beds were set-up; and when school was done for the day, we picked up the kids and brought them here to sleep for the first time.
The house has seen a lot of changes since we purchased it.
- The living room / dining room / my office floors we refinished and we stripped wallpaper and painted playroom (the wallpaper removal in that room was so horrible; I thought it was never going to be done).
- Juliana’s room was decorated with white wainscoting and happy pink stripes. And her bed was converted to a loft.
- The boys’ room was brightly painted.
- The kid’s bathroom was updated.
- We made some minor changes to the front of the house and insulated the attic.
And then we had a break, we didn’t make any major changes for a while. In the fall we replaced the garage doors – this winter there was no longer a cold breeze blowing in the garage when the doors were shut.
We also had two large trees taken down in front of the house.
We have a large project in progress behind the house, but that isn’t quite done yet. We still need new windows, and some updates in the kitchen, and …there’s always another project on the list.
If you want to see real change – look at how much these 3 have changed in the past two years – what happened to my babies!
