I mentioned back in July that we signed a contract to purchase a house. Well, it is now official. After many months of searching, we think we found the perfect house for us. We did have to make some compromises, though. Stacy wanted to try to move closer to her parents, but after looking in that area and seeing what we could afford, and then finding out that the school district was planning to outsource their special needs kids, we decided to stay in the same area that we already were. We got more house (and land) for our money, the taxes are cheaper, and the school district plans to keep the special needs kids in the district.
We need to send a HUGE shoutout to our awesome real estate agent (my mom), and Stacy’s parents for helping us out with a tough situation. We bought our condo in 2004, and thanks to the financial crisis, the market value on it was less than what we originally paid for it. We started to get really frustrated with all of the lowball offers that people were giving us. Stacy’s parents offered to buy it from us at a fair price. Still less than what we paid for it, but better that those lowball offers we were getting.
As a bonus of Stacy’s parents buying our condo, we are able to continue to live there while we do some work on our new house before we move in, like replace the carpet and paint some of the rooms. Let me take you on a quick tour.
Here’s the front door / foyer. To the left of the front door is the kitchen.
This is the view of the foyer standing in the doorway to the kitchen. To the right is the living room, and the doorway on the left is the hallway to the bedrooms.
This is the kitchen. Through that doorway on the right is the laundry room and door to the garage. To the left of the windows is the dining room.
This is the dining room. On the other side of the dining room is the living room. If you look close, you can see James on the floor in the living room. There are French doors in the living room that lead to the backyard.
Here are a couple of pics of the living room:
This is the hallway to the bedrooms. The first door on the right will be James’ room. The room at the end of the hall will be my office and storage space. The first door on the left is a bathroom. Just past the bathroom is the door to Stacy’s and my bedroom.
This will be James’ room:
Office/ Storage:
Hallway Bathroom:
Our bedroom:
Our bathroom:
As you can see from the pictures, it does need a little bit of updating. Our plan is to have the carpeting replaced in the living room, hallway, and the three bedrooms; and paint all the rooms before we move in. The bathrooms we can do sometime in the future once our bank account recovers. They are both functional, so we don’t need to rush to update them and bring them into the 21st century.
As we’ve been working, we had to find some things to keep James occupied. We had a little TV/VCR combo in our bedroom so we brought that over so he could watch some movies. We also brought his iPad to keep him entertained. And something pretty big happened. Stacy had setup the iPad for James and opened an app called Peek-a-Boo Barn. It’s a pretty simple app. There is a barn full of animals. When the doors are closed, they knock on the barn door. If you touch the barn, the door opens and reveals an animal. James was actually touching it by himself. If Stacy hadn’t shown me the video that she took, I wouldn’t have believed it. This is one of those milestone moments and I couldn’t be prouder. Take a look for yourself:
The previous owners had moved out several weeks ago, so the lawn was a bit long and really needed to be mowed. That was today’s project. Here’s a pic of Stacy and James watching me mow the front yard:
Stacy didn’t want me to have all the fun, so here’s a pic of her mowing the back yard:
James turns 2 in a week, but since we just bought this house and have so much to do, we will have to postpone his birthday party. We’ll celebrate privately next weekend, and probably have an actual party for him sometime in September or October.
