Moving!

I hate when I let myself get so far behind on my blogging, because then I feel like I have to dig myself out of the catch-up hole I have fallen into.  Life has just been so crazy lately.  I feel like that's an ongoing theme, but it's been an especially wild ride lately!

The biggest news is that we are moving!!  It's not far--just a few blocks, actually, but it's still been stressful and crazy.  For about six months, we have had our feelers out for a bigger home within our ward boundaries.  Due to Adam's current calling, we have really felt like we need to stay in our ward, but we have also started to feel like we would like a little more space.  We have a good friend in our ward who is a real estate agent, and he has had his eyes open for properties in the ward boundaries that we might be interested in.  Whenever something new would come up, he would email us the MLS listing.  We looked at a handfull of homes in the area, but none of them really felt like the home we wanted to raise our family in long-term, and that's really what we were searching for.  

The week after Christmas, though, another home popped up on the list.  We checked it out, and it really felt like exactly what we were looking for.  It met most of our "wants":  four bedrooms all on the same floor, a three-car garage, an enormous master walk-in closet, a main-floor office for Adam, and a "kid space" that our children can hang out in with their friends, especially as they get older.  It also had lots of great extras that we weren't necessarily looking for, but that we love anyway--three fireplaces, a walk-out basement, a jetted tub, a fabulous guest suite, and small walk-in closets in the kids' bedrooms, too.  We loved it!

We decided to put an offer on it, but our real estate agent friend told us that in order for the seller to take our offer seriously, we needed to have our house on the market.  We talked on New Year's Day, spent the day cleaning our home, and the next morning we listed it to sell.  By the end of the day (!) we were under contract both on our home, and on the home we wanted to buy.

It seemed a little too good to be true, and it was.  Our initial buyers terminated their contract after mold was found in our crawlspace during the home inspection.  The good news, though, was that we had a second buyer waiting in the wings to make another offer on our home, without our having to put it back on the market.  The second offer was a few thousand dollars less than the first, but we felt blessed to move forward without too much hassle.  

There have been a number of ups and downs as we have moved forward.  It has absolutely been stressful and challenging!  We feel like buying a house is stressful, and selling a house is 100x worse!  But it looks like this is actually going to happen!  We are set to close on both houses in just over two weeks!

So I have been packing our lives into boxes.  Gratefully since the other house is so close, it will be much easier than it would be moving across the country.  But it's still a whole lot of work.    At least I have cute little friends to help me!