After a much needed week off from pretty much everything (including blogging), I’m back!
This past year went by so quickly and I was surprised when I got an email from my blogging site that congratulated me on 77 posts. That’s a lot of posts! I mean, I’m no Younghouselove posting 2 times each weekday, but I’m pretty proud of myself for keeping this going since last March.
My goal for 2012 is to post at least two times each week and get to a total of 125 posts for the year. With a new job, new baby, new house and lots of marketing/business stuff thrown in there for good measure, I should have a lot to talk about!
Oh wait, did I say new house?
If you’ve been following along with my saga, you already know that we sold our townhouse in October. However, since I also lost my job around the same time, we couldn’t buy a new house and instead moved into a rental. As luck would have it, I landed a new job pretty quickly and started in early December.
Even though we weren’t really *looking* for houses, I was still using redfin.com on a regular basis to keep track of what was out there and save potential winners to my account favorites. On Christmas Day, my husband and I drove around to our top 10 houses to check out (um…by this I mean stalk) the neighborhoods. Based on our drive-by, we were able to knock a bunch of houses off the list and also mark down two of our absolute favorites.
Since I was off work between Christmas and New Year’s, I went and toured our remaining top six houses with our real estate agent (who also happens to be my aunt) and my mom. The two houses from our drive-by favorite list were pretty great inside too – so I set up a second showing so that my husband and father (a custom home builder who wanted to “kick the tires”) could see them.
We came up with one clear winner – a house that meets almost every single piece of our ‘dream house’ criteria.
It’s on two acres of land, has a four car garage (yes, my husband is doing a happy dance), a beautiful kitchen with granite, and plenty of rooms inside to meet our needs. There are a number of projects that need to be done to really make the house perfect for us, mostly wallpaper removal, painting, buying a new oven and dishwasher, and completely renovating an ugly bathroom. It’s all pretty doable though, since I love a good project to focus on.
After much deliberation, we decided to go for it. We submitted our contract early this morning (after signing a few dozen sheets of paper last night around midnight) and now we’re waiting to hear if they accept our offer or will be sending through a counter-offer. Since the property is available immediately, we could go to settlement by the end of the month. Which seems absolutely incredible if you think of what a mess everything was just a few months ago!
We hope to hear something back from their agent soon, so I’ll be trying to keep my mind off of it for the rest of the day. Yeah….as if that’s possible. I admit I’ve pretty much drawn out plans for decorating each room of the house already. Cross your fingers that I don’t get my heart broken!