Another Year, Another House

WARNING: This post is decidedly short on pictures.  Read on for a brief-ish re-cap of my summer and stay tuned for more pictures in coming days… 

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It’s been well over a year since my last post and it was a year between it and the previous post.  Clearly I’m ambivalent about this blogging thing.

When I last wrote, we had just had hardwood floors installed throughout our main floor, up the stairs, and into the upstairs hallway.  They were beautiful and I adored them.  And I planned on adoring them for many years to come.  But this past June, an opportunity presented itself to move into a neighborhood that we’ve been wanting to live in for years.  We’d tried to move a few times before and it hadn’t worked out, so we figured it wasn’t in the cards, but this June, I was tired of wishing and wondering and so we decided to do it: we put on offer on what we lovingly called “The Ugly House”.  It was accepted and we put our house on the market on July 3rd.  By July 5th, our house had sold and we were ecstatic.  On July 6th, we had the inspection on “The Ugly House” and everything came crashing down around our ears.

The inspection came up with way too many issues beyond the obvious cosmetics we had prepared ourselves to deal with – the biggest being a sinking foundation.  The sellers weren’t willing to fix it, so we walked away from the house.   Unfortunately, we had already sold our house, so we were looking at leaving the house that we loved to move into an apartment with an uncertain outlook on when another house would come available in the neighborhood that we loved.

Let me tell you, July was a stressful month!  Fortunately, a lucky star must have been shining down on us because our friend (who already lived in the neighborhood and lives across the street from the house we were going to buy) used her not-inconsiderable networking prowess and found us a new house!  This new house was only a few doors more down the street and was decidedly NOT ugly.  The owners had been planning to move in the Spring, so they had updated the downstairs already.  They hadn’t yet gotten to the upstairs, but that gives us a nice mix of visitor-ready and DIY-ready rooms.  You can read more of the story at my new neighbors house here: http://becca-homeiswheremystorybegins.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-power-of-people-in-hood.html)

There was much more up and down during the purchase and August was also an exceedingly stressful month culminating in our closing date on our new house being pushed back a week.  So, we ended up moving out of our old house and into our friends’ house for a week.  You don’t often get to have a week-long slumber party as an adult, so that actually turned out to be pretty fun!  FINALLY, on September 4th (the first day of school), we were able to move into our new house.  Our girls left one house for their first day of school at their new schools and came home to a different house!  Welcome home!

It took me about a month to recover from what I lovingly think of as “The Summer of Hell”, but I’m nearly healed and have started in on my first projects.  I’m finding that I, at least, want to share these projects with my family and friends, so I’m going to make another attempt at keeping this blog updated.

Check back for more updates…