To move or not to move...

That is the question!

With the addition of family member #8 in the very near future, we are definitely outgrowing our house. So, a couple of months ago we started toying with the idea of moving to something bigger. We would LOVE to be closer to DH's work (45 minute commute each way definitely cuts into family/free time), but for some reason neither of us are too crazy about the idea of moving back to Utah County. This is also a GREAT time to buy a home - home prices continue to drop and we could most likely get something bigger for a pretty good price right now. At the same time, it is not a great time to sell a house. We have several homes in the neighborhood that have been up for sale for 6-8 months with no serious offers at all during that time.

At the same time that we started looking around at buying a new home, we also started looking into possibly just refinancing our current home. When we bought this house we ended up taking out 2 mortgages to avoid paying mortgage insurance and we had locked in at a great rate at the time - at least we thought that we had. When we showed up to closing we were surprised and very disappointed to find that our mortgage lender hadn't locked us in at the rate we wanted when DH had called him to lock in and so we were left with more than a 1/2 point higher than we supposed to get. Unfortunately at that point there was nothing that could be done (at least as far as we knew) and rates were continuing to rise so we had to settle for the higher rate.

So, fast forward to today. Rates have been very good for the last little while, but we have been hesitant to refinance because we are not sure how much longer we want to remain in this home and if it ends up being a short period of time, then the closing costs to refinance are usually too high to allow you to come out ahead even with the lower monthly payments.

Well, DH found out from a co-worker about a mortgage company that can offer better than the typical interest rates because they only deal with people that have really good credit scores. So we looked into and it looked like we would be able to get quite a bit lower of a rate than we have now and be able to pay off the closing costs with our savings in less than a year - plus being able to consolidate the two mortgages into one loan and lower our loan time to 20-years (instead of our current 30-year loan which we have 23 years left on).

After thinking and praying about the decision for a few weeks, we decided to refinance with Box Home Loans and hope that our home appraised for high enough that we would be able to avoid the mortgage insurance. So we started the application process - most of which we were able to fill out and digitally sign online. We had our credit scores run and then I got a call the morning before Kitty's birthday from an appraiser who wanted to come to our house in 2 hours. At the time the kids were off-track from school so they were each assigned some cleaning jobs to do and we frantically cleaned the house as much as we could until the appraiser showed up. At one point during the cleaning Luke made the comment, "Wow! I wish our house was this clean all the time!"

A couple of days later we got a copy of the appraisal and to our pleasant surprise our home appraised for higher than we thought it would - YEA!

Then yesterday I drove down to Orem to pick DH from work and we drove over to the Title company to sign the settlement papers. Our closing costs ended up being slightly less than the estimate we were given and our monthly payments will be a few dollars less than we were estimating as well. Kitty and Kay came with us - which I was a little hesitant to do - but they were both very well behaved and Kay had fun holding the pen while I signed/initialed all of the papers - she wanted to help. And we were at the Title company for just a little over a half an hour.

So our plan is to stay in this home for probably another 2 years and then see what the market is like and possibly try to sell then. In the meantime we have some home improvements that we want to do before then - and hopefully sooner rather than later so we can enjoy them a little before we think about moving. Some of the projects in the plans include fencing in the back yard, building a shed, putting in a wood floor in the living room, adding cabinets in the laundry room, and adding an extension to the side of our driveway for some additional parking.

We really like the area and ward that we live in and everyone is so super friendly around here. We also love the huge yard and garden area that we have here. We just wish that the home was a little bit bigger (with bigger rooms) and a little closer to DH's work.