Thankful on a Thursday: home edition

21. I'm so thankful that God orchestrated everything from my in-laws gift of a downpayment to a realtor that we can trust who found our new home for us.

22. My parents who have let us rent out the home where we currently live for three years. I love this house and it will be hard to say goodbye- easier though because it's still in the family.

23. That I am staying at home with Malakai so I can get things done little by littler during naps. I'm not sure how smoothly this move would be if I were working full time.

24. Frequent visits with my mom while she does some touch ups to the house in preparation for new tenants.

25. my amazing realtor who keeps giving us little gifts like a Red Robin giftcard to celebrate, and a garage door opener because the sellers couldn't find one. She has gone above & beyond through the whole process.

26. Our mortgage officers checking in with us weekly, and sometimes more to make sure we are up to date and understand everything that is taking place.

27. An old high school classmate, a friend from church, and my cousin for providing us with all the boxes we could need for our move.

28. How things are working out so perfectly in terms of money. Getting our cleaning deposit back, not making a house payment til May, and qualifying for the tax credit are all going to be very helpful in getting us back on track with our savings (that all went to Kai's birth).

29. Purging the excess stuff and how freeing it can be. Not to mention the extra cash we made at our moving sale and our ability to give quite a bit of clothing to a local group that ministers to homeless teens. I'm sure the kids will appreciate donations from a young couple.

30. Our new house. It didn't start out as being what we thought we wanted, but it's exactly what we needed and I can't wait to make it our own.

busy

I can't remember a time I've ever been this busy...but I'm guessing that I probably said the same thing three years ago when working full time and planning a wedding. I'm sure I said it again last year when working full time, going to grad school, and planning for baby.

Currently I am:

• staying at home with my 8 month old son

•  working at home 10-15 hours a week providing daycare to 10 month old Henry

• communicating with our mortgage company, realtor, and my husband daily about the constantly evolving process of buying our first home

•  packing, cleaning, repairing, and organizing our current home (not to mention the day to day of laundry & dishes)
•  posting ads online and showing our house to possible tenants for my parents
•  posting ads and communicating with possible buyers of our old couch, portable dishwasher and other items we are trying to purge before moving

{last weekend's moving sale}

• all the while trying to find time to myself to read, nap, blog, etc. so I don't have a nervous breakdown. 

I'm sure I've missed a thing or two. Is my head spinning? Can anyone help me stop it?

I also want to find a direct url (ya know, a .com) for my blog that fits. Breaking New Ground is taken, so now I'm considering changing my blog title altogether. Maybe not. I can't decide.

I've also contacted someone quite talented about designing a new header and buttons for a whole new look. For now, I'm keeping the details to myself:) 

pending!

SALE IS PENDING!

I can hardly believe that we are buying a house. It all happened relatively fast. Today overall was a rough day, but I'm feeling good about the decisions we made. 

Our initial offer was countered and was higher than we were expecting. We crunched numbers and made phone calls to our loan consultant and realtor. When all was said and done we decided it was safer to accept than to counter again and possibly lose the home. After doing so, I felt a little uneasy. I kept wondering if we should have gone lower. However, what solidified it for me was Katie's email. She sent us a link to the MLS site to show us it is now marked pending (it's the little things that make me smile) and also mentioned that the original asking price was nearly $20,000 higher than what we agreed to and that the selling realtor told her she had several more calls on it today. I feel like we made this choice quickly, but now that I know we could have lost the one house we love out of the dozens we've seen...I'm at peace.

So...here's some new pictures and some from the previous post with descriptions. 

weekend wrap up

So I've already put it out there as to the biggest part of our weekend, but I'll back up and share how we got to that point.

Thursday night we narrowed down our list of houses to look at over the weekend and emailed our Realtor, Katie. She emailed back Friday morning and let us know that 3 out of the 4 either weren't available or weren't a good idea. One was pending, one was a short-sale with an offer and back up offers, and the other was in bad shape. So we went through the MLS again and came up with 3 more, 2 of them were available to see. The one house that stayed on our list was the only one that Katie emailed us about directly as it's in great condition, located in a beautiful neighborhood, and in our price range.

On Saturday we celebrated my Father in Laws birthday by getting together and having lunch at their home. The plan after that was to leave Malakai to play with Grandma and Grandpa while we looked at the three houses. We started with THE house and were pretty excited about it. When we got in the car to follow Katie to the next house she drove us by a nearby park and I couldn't stop smiling.

an offer

We made an offer and now all we can do is wait. We should know something by 5pm Monday night.

Meanwhile I'm like a kid before the first day of school...I can't sleep. I just lay there imagining what colors we'd choose and where everything will go.

The anticipation is killing me!

roller-coaster ride

Do you ever set off to write about something, or tell someone a story and as you begin you think to yourself "have I told them this already"? I do this ALL.THE.TIME! I'm pretty sure my mother hears me tell the same stories and updates about Malakai or our house hunt the most, sorry mom.

I also do this a lot when blogging. I find that my blog jumps around a lot from baby stuff, day to day, house hunt, etc and I'd have to go back through and read my posts on a topic to remember what I've already posted about. It gets more convoluted when I do a post that has a little bit of everything in it. I think I'll start keeping things separate. Partly for you, dear readers, but mostly for my own sanity.

weekend wrap up

I don't like wrapping up the weekend. Sunday nights are my least favorite time of the week. We're exhausted from trying to fit in as much as we can (even if some of it is napping) into the weekend and we try to get to bed at a decent hour so Ben can get up for work early in the morning. Malakai never really cooperates with that and somehow I always forget to make Ben a lunch.

This past weekend was pretty full, but also pretty great. On Friday night we celebrated Kai's great-grandpa's birthday at a local pizza place. My grandparents have been in Hawaii for the past 7 weeks (I know, poor them) so it was great to see them again and we got showered with gifts. Meanwhile, Kai got passed around from great- aunt, to 2nd cousin, to great- uncle, to great-grand.

Saturday was generally lazy. We got up early with Malakai and played, then during his nap Ben played his video game and I looked at houses online and spent maybe 5 minutes trying to figure out our tax mess before giving up (again). I took a TON of photos of Malakai...

wearing one of Ben's baby shirts

 and holding the balloons that he sent to work for dada's birthday

          

... we took a nap, drove by some houses (3 of which out of the 4 were c.r.a.p.) and went to Red Robin to use Ben's birthday burger coupon (did you know they send you a coupon for a free burger every year if you join their bday club?...awesome), and came home full and sleepy to watch The Beatles, Help! which was a favorite of mine during my Beatles obsession in middle school.

Sunday we went to 1st service at 9am and were only a few minutes late. Malakai played with the other babes in the nursery for the second time. Had a break to socialize with some people in between services and then at 10:45am Malakai and I played in the nursery as it was my Sunday to volunteer. Ben came in to feed him a bottle about halfway through and we chatted about having him volunteer with me on a regular basis when he's not playing with the worship band.

Afterwards we headed out to my parents' house for the Super Bowl and a family birthday get together for Ben. His siblings couldn't make it, but his parents came and we ate way too much food (chips, 7 layer dip, carrots & ranch, pasta salad, birthday cake, ice cream, pizza....), watched the game (I only watched the commercials, and wasn't impressed), and stuck around for a little while afterwards. Malakai had another two person (a third would have been even better) blow out. Ben and I are so childish and end up giggling uncontrollably while trying to clean him up. He's so wiggly now that he ended up sticking his foot in his diaper and thus getting poo on every piece of clothing had been wearing. Luckily, I've learned my lesson and now pack two entire extra outfits wherever we go.

Ben & his birthday balloons 

G'Pa and Malakai

Once we got home we checked our email and finalized plans with our realtor to go see some houses this week (tonight!) and chatted til we fell asleep...and then an hour later woke up to feed Malakai again and get him to sleep....and so on and so forth...

house hunt

Saturday afternoon we set out to see 4 houses guided by a Realtor we hadn't met, but the first house we wanted to see happened to be listed under her so we just asked her to show us the others as well while we were at it.

The first stop was a short-sale that was either waiting on the bank to approve a buyers offer or had just been approved...I wasn't really clear on that. Either way it wasn't really available but the sellers let us browse as the rest in that area had similar if not identical layouts. Ben really like this house from what we saw of it online, unfortunately the layout wasn't what we were looking for. Also, ALL the bathrooms had carpet. Sorry if this is something you have in your house...but, ew!

The second was a slightly different variation on the first and also a short-sale but with no offers. We didn't really like it either. The fact that it looked like a frat house after finals wasn't helping. The sellers were obviously in between packing and cleaning, meaning that there were just shreds of junk here and there, wires hanging out of holes in the walls, and very very dirty shag carpet. I know that it could cleaned up easily but it was an even more closed off layout so we weren't all that impressed.

We fell in love with house number three. Even though we haven't met with the loan consultant yet, I have a feeling it'll be out of our price range. It had a very open layout with the master suite on the main floor and an open landing upstairs. It's also within walking distance of a great K-8 school.

Number 4 wasn't bad either. Across the street from the same school. A bit older than the others and about 300 less square feet. The whole thing was BLUE. Literally every room had some blue on the walls, the carpet in the entire house was smurf blue and the outside was blue with blue trim! Obviously we could look past colors since they are easily changed, but whoah!

Throughout our jaunt from home to home the Realtor didn't seem to take us seriously. She didn't really tell us much about any of the houses until we asked, and she actually had negative things to say about some of them...interesting coming from the realtor trying to sell the homes! Needless to say, we'll be looking for a different Realtor to work with when we look again.

It was so much fun to look at houses and talk about our likes and dislikes. We drove around the neighborhoods on our own after parting ways with the Realtor and jotted down some of the other house numbers with For Sale signs so we could look them up online later. There was an model house open at the edge of one neighborhood but the bebe bean had fallen asleep in the back and we didn't want to wake him.

After sleeping on it that night we both felt that house 3 wouldn't fit our lifestyles very well. I couldn't get the second story open landing out of my head. It's easy to climb up and would be a fatal fall to the living room floor below. Also, all the "kids" rooms were on the second floor and the master was on the first. While we swooned over the master suite with the dual shower heads and walk in closet through the bathroom, we'd be really far away from Malakai upstairs and I think we'd get too tired of running up and down them in the middle of the night.

Ben and I both grew up in single story or "ranch style" homes and I have a strong preference for a single story home for my small children. Perhaps if we are able to move up to another home some years down the road when the kids are older and more independent that a second story wouldn't be a problem at all. We'd still prefer for the master to be on the main level so we could grow old there.

So I've spent the rest of the weekend browsing homes online and saving them to my favorites on Zillow (an awesome website that I found via The Nest). Once we meet with the loan consultant at the end of the month we'll contact Realtors and start looking in person again.

Let me know if you have any tips to help us make the process go a little smoother. I'll keep ya'll posted on our new adventure!

a little scary

Ben and I have started to seriously look into whether or not we could buy a house this year...yikes!

It's pretty overwhelming and it's hard to know where to begin. There are so many factors to weigh in on, people to consult with, and houses to look at!

We're checking out a house this weekend and will probably troll the open houses as well. Also, we have an appointment with a loan consultant that my Grandma recommended week after next. To be honest, our debt to income ratio is a bit scary (darned student loans!) so I'm not getting my hopes up in case we find that we'd be totally in over our heads once we meet with the financing people.

Still, it's rather exciting and fun to dream.