Saying goodbye

Monday, August 4, 2014

Today we cleaned, cleaned, cleaned and said a final goodbye to our house.  Some women from the ward helped with the cleaning while I was running kids around left and right and cleaning in-between.  I took a final picture of the kids in front of the house.  It has been a good house for us.  Three of our 6 kids were born here in the master bedroom - where that window in the upper left of the picture is!  I love the flowers in front that give such a pop of color to the house!  We will miss the home, the great neighbors/neighborhood, the great ward and the schools.  At the same time, we are excited to meet new people and for the new experiences that await us in our new home.

** Just as a side note:  We were a little bummed with all of the changes that the new owners made right after we moved out.  I went back over to the home because we were trying to find a key to a room that one of their kids had accidentally locked them out of and they had painted just about every room in the house and ripped out the wood floor in the living room and the tile in the kitchen.  I think they also put in new carpet in most of the house (which needed to be done).  They also took out most of the trees and put up a big white, vinyl fence (which most of the neighbors don't like).  It was a little depressing to think of all of the work that we put in to fixing up the house to sell and then to see all of it changed right away!

Moving day

 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Well, we were able to sell our house pretty quickly.  We accepted an offer the first week it was listed on the market.  We sold it to someone in our ward who is currently living with their parents and wanted to stay in the neighborhood.  They ended up just working through our realtor so we were able to save some money that way and they didn't need to move in right away so we ended up renting back from them for a couple of weeks until we could get into our new house.

After we accepted the offer and everything was going smoothly on that end, we started parking the cars out in the driveway and filling the garage up with boxes and furniture.  On Thursday we rented a U-haul truck and thankfully we had a lot of help loading the truck and even people bringing their own trucks and trailers to move more things.  We got the bulk of the furniture and boxes moved in on Thursday and then DH, M&M, Luke, MJ and I moved most of the rest of the stuff on Friday while the other kids were in school.  We then had a couple of days to do some cleaning and move out the final few things.  Unfortunately we didn't take many pictures of the move.  I was hoping to get a picture of DH driving the truck but of course I forgot!  It turns out that the only pictures we have are ones that MJ took while she was playing on my ipad!

Actually, I think I took this picture of DH and Luke pulling stuff down from the garage.

The one picture we have with the moving truck in it!

A picture of MJ's foot :) - with our wood floor in the background.

We are deeply grateful for all of the awesome help we had from family and friends on the day of our move!  It is amazing how much junk we had accumulated and what a big job it was to move it all.  There is no way that we could have moved everything so quickly if we hadn't had all of the help that we did!

We spent Thursday night in the new house, which made it much easier for the Elementary kids to get to the bus stop the next day!  The bus stop is just down the street from our house.  Thankfully I only had to drive them out to the bus stop from our old neighborhood those first couple of days.

First Day of School - Elementary kids

July 28-29, 2014

After the purchase of our new home I went to the new elementary school for our kids and had them registered. They said that they would let us know our track assignment in about a week. Unfortunately we didn't get much say in the track we got so hopefully next year we can get on a better one.  We are on "C" track this year which means that they start school on July 28th and go until July 2, 2015.

The week before school started I took the kids over to the school so that we could find their classrooms and so we could figure out the layout of the school a little bit.  We were able to meet most of the teachers because they were there setting up their classrooms.  The school is much newer than our old one and the layout is pretty easy once you figure it out.  One nice feature is that the classrooms all have their own bathroom and drinking fountain!

Since we were not moved into our new house yet when the kids started school, I decided to drive them to the bus stop in our new neighborhood so that they would be able to figure out where to go and they could get used to the bus route.  So on Monday morning I loaded the kids up in the car and drove them out to our new neighborhood.  It was a bit earlier than the kids are used to because the school starts a 1/2 hour earlier than our old one, plus we needed to include some additional travel time.  Just Blondie and Kitty started on Monday.  Kay had a meeting with her teacher on Monday and then started school on Tuesday.

After the kids got on the bus, I drove over to the school to make sure they were able to figure out where to line up for their classes.  I was a little bit nervous for Blondie because her class only had 5 girls in it - and about 20 boys!  They have since gotten a couple more girls but they are seriously outnumbered!

Then after school I went back to the new neighborhood to pick them up at the bus stop and take them home.

Blondie - 6th grade, Kitty - 4th grade

Kay started school on Tuesday and she was super excited about it!  I again drove the kids out to the bus stop and then drove to the school to help Kay figure out where to go.  After school Kitty and Kay got off the bus but there was no Blondie.  I then got a call from her teacher that she had missed the bus.  She was a bit emotional about it but apparently she had been waiting for Kay to get on the bus and hadn't seen her so she went to try and find her and ended up missing the bus.  What she didn't know was that Kay had gotten on the bus before her.

Kay - 1st grade

Kay talk

One night after we had our offer accepted on our new home, we were having Family Home Evening and DH started it off by asking if anyone had any concerns.  Kay quickly responded with:  "Yes. Bees and wasps. They bug me."

Our new home has a big great room area on the main level that is attached to the kitchen.  Right now we only have an old love seat and a glider rocking chair in the room so it looks very big and open.  One day Kay said, "What should we call this room? The exercise room? The relaxing room?"

I was making a boutonniere for M&M's date for a school dance and Kay asked why M&M was going to give him a boutonniere: "Is it because she loves him?"

Kay:  Dad, what does the tooth fairy need with all those teeth?

Home for sale

June 13-18

We closed on our new home on May 29 but it still took us a couple of weeks to get our home ready to list.  We finally had it listed on June 13 and had an offer that we accepted and were under contract with the buyers on June 18!  We ended up selling to a family in our ward who were living with the wife's parents that live in our ward.  They were going to be looking into buying and really wanted to stay in the ward/neighborhood and when they saw our home listed, they jumped on it.  It turned out somewhat convenient because they didn't need or want to move in right away because the wife was pregnant with their 3rd child and was due right around the closing date (they have twin 4 year old boys who are in MJ's primary class).  So we were able to arrange to rent back from them until we could get into our new house.

At this point things were kind of weird because we knew that we were moving - and had known for a little over a month but we still weren't actually moving for another month and a half.  Our realtor - who is a friend of ours who used to live in our neighborhood - was totally awesome through this whole, long process!  She was very patient and always willing to take us around to see homes and was never pushy in any way whatsoever.  She was quite amazed with how smoothly everything seemed to work out for us at the end of the day.  She was also with us every step of the way, explaining things that we didn't understand and helping to recommend a lender as well as being there at closing with us - when once again things were thrown for a little bit of a loop when we were signing papers...

Here are the pictures that were taken to list our home.  I thought that we had one of the basement bathroom, but I wasn't able to find it.  The basement bathroom is a 3/4 bath.

Front of home

Back of home

Formal living room

Kitchen

Kitchen/dining room

Door leading to garage and backyard - off of the kitchen

Master bedroom

Master bathroom

Master bathroom

Upstairs bedroom

Upstairs bedroom

Upstairs bathroom

Family room

Basement bedroom (no closet, but has own door to basement bathroom) - off of the family room

Basement bedroom

Basement bedroom - used as an office

Laundry room

House prepping

End of April - May 2014

Some of the prep work we did when getting the home ready for the market:

Cleaning the tile floors:

Floor with the cleaning solution on it.  OxiClean did an amazing job of cleaning the tile grout.  You just had to mix the solution and let it sit on the grout for a little while and then with a little bit of scrubbing it came away clean.

Some of the before and after pictures.  These 3 pictures are all of the same section of tile/grout.

Painting:

We painted an accent wall in the living room/dining room area.  It was a nice beige color that I think added a lot to the room.  (If we had decided to stay in the house I was going to try a burgundy red color on that wall but we thought for selling the home we were safer with a neutral color.)

We also repainted the whole kitchen & living room area along with the baseboards.  We then repainted the accent wall in the family room, painted M&M's room a light blue color, and repainted baseboards throughout most of the house.

We also painted most of the wood fence with stain/weather protector.  The kids were able to help with that - the taller kids on the upper portion and the shorter ones on the bottom.

Then the rest of the house was decluttered and deep cleaned.  Thanks to my parents who allowed us to store a ton of our stuff at their house.  We actually started taking things to their house several months before we even put our home up for sale - with the hope that we would be moving sometime during the summer.  We also put some of our furniture and storage into half of the garage for staging the home.  All in all it was a ton of work!

New house?

Saturday, April 26

We outgrew our current home several years ago and unfortunately the perfect time for us to move would have been around the time I was diagnosed with cancer so it just wasn't possible for us at that time.  We love our neighborhood and have been pleased with the schools that our children go to, we just needed/wanted a bigger home.  I have been looking on and off for about a year and we just weren't finding anything that really felt like it would fit our family.  Probably one of our biggest obstacles with finding a new home was the kitchen area.  With a family of 8, I was having a hard time finding a home with a big enough kitchen to fit our table and then with enough bedrooms for us.  Another obstacle often was the basement.  A lot of homes seemed to have enough square footage, but then the basement would have a bunch of small rooms with no big gathering areas for a family room.  Another problem we ran in to often was tiny backyards.  We don't need a huge one, but I wanted one that had enough room for the kids to play and room for at least a small garden area.

So I have been searching the MLS quite regularly and would go out with a realtor friend of ours whenever something came up that I was interested in.  Occasionally I would take DH back to look at a home a second time but up to this point nothing had interested both of us.  Then on Thursday night of this week a new home came on the market which looked like it might have some potential for our family.  I contacted our realtor the next day and asked if she could set up a showing for it plus another 2 homes as well.  We thought of waiting until Monday but I decided to have her set them up for Saturday and I would see if DH would come with me.

The appointments were set for the afternoon and I was able to convince DH to come with me.  The first home we saw showed like a dream.  Both of us walked through thinking, "Is this for real?" and "Do people really live here?"  It was in fabulous condition and was absolutely spotless.  Not only that but it had a huge kitchen/eating area and a huge great room off of the kitchen.  Then we went down to the basement and the basement family room was huge with lots of light.  Off of the family room were french doors going into an office - perfect for DH.  It had 6 bedrooms plus the office downstairs and another small office area off of the laundry room on the main level.  Then to top it off there was a good sized deck off of the kitchen and a backyard that was not huge but an okay size for our needs.  (Unfortunately it was a rainy day so we weren't able to get a good look at the deck/backyard at that time.)

When we got in the car to drive to the next appointment, DH asked me, "Is there any reason why we would not want to make an offer on that home?"  I was blown away because DH has not even been close to asking anything like that to me with anything we have seen up to this point.  So we went to the next two houses and they were nothing like we were looking for so we talked to our realtor and discussed putting an offer on the first home we saw.  Based on the listing price and the condition of the home, her feeling was that it would sell quickly so our best bet would be to try and get our offer in first.  So she went home and wrote up the offer and sent it in.  Then we were on pins and needles waiting to hear anything back.  Since the next day was Sunday, we put the deadline for a response on Monday.

On Sunday after church, our realtor called us and said that the owners had received 2 other offers in addition to ours and they were all pretty comparable (although I think ours may have been the lower of the 3). Our offer was the first one in and the realtor for the sellers said that they felt really good about working with us and didn't want to get into bidding wars.  They asked us to counter slightly higher and asked if they could rent back from us for two months.  So we countered slightly higher and agreed to let them rent back until July 31 since that would give us time to get our home ready to sell and hopefully sold by then.  Well, they accepted our offer and then it was a rush to make sure we could get the financing we needed and everything ready for the closing date 30 days away.

At this point everything felt like we were in a dream.  We pulled aside M&M and Luke to let them know what was going on.  DH started out by saying, "Well, it appears that we may have bought a house."  To which M&M replied, "Wait, was it an accident?"  DH and I busted up laughing at that!  About a week after our offer was accepted, we almost backed out of the deal but after DH talked to a couple of coworkers, we decided to go ahead with it.  Now comes the crazy part of getting our current home ready to sell!

Front of the house

Great room

Kitchen

Laundry room & mud room

Office/craft room for me - right off of the laundry room. Also right next to the garage and kitchen.

Family room - in basement

Office for DH

Play area under the stairs

Deck

Backyard