Those are some gorgeous corners

Isn't my hunny an artist? We are still working on caulk and putty for the nail holes, but it is looking great.

Continuing Crown

The last piece of crown goes up in the master:


And on to the office:

These guys are pros. Nailing the last piece in the office:

Happy Home Owners!

We are working on some big and awesome home improvement projects before we move into our new house.
Step one: Crown Molding

Mom and Dad E. are in town helping us. It is looking gorgeous!

Moldings, crown, base and casing

What do you think?

Family Picture

We were experimenting with the remote shutter release Mom and Dad got Doug for Christmas. Ben didn't get it...

We're Buying a House!

Doug and I are taking the leap - we're buying a house! We have thought and prayed about this decision for the last 4 years (pretty much as soon as we knew where we were heading after law school), and we finally feel like the time is right. Prices have come down significantly in the last few years, and interest rates are low too. So, though the future is never certain (and sometimes scares us to death) we're going for it!

If you've been on Facebook, this is not news to you, but I'll use this forum to talk about it a little more. Sorry if it gets rambly--this is mostly intended as a journal for posterity. :)

Front view of the house:

The front door. There is a small office/bedroom to the left as you look at the picture, and the stairs, bathroom and coat closet to the right.

This is what you see when you walk in the front door. The back door straight ahead is open in this picture, but is mostly glass, so the view is about the same. To the left is the kitchen and the right is the family room. We like the open feel of the great room floor plan.

Family room with fireplace and media niche. The yellow paint is not going to stay. We're thinking of doing a mid-tone natural color with perhaps a dark red highlight wall in the media niche. Gas fireplace, but it will take wood if we want to make a mess. You also see the door into the office. The original floor plan had that as an open arch way, but the previous owners installed a door. That's great in theory, but they put it on backwards so the light switches are behind the door. We'll probably replace the door opening the other way. Tile floors throughout the great room.

Heee!! My gorgeous kitchen. I'm like a kid in a candy shop. I don't know what I'm going to do with all that space! Maybe my measuring cups will each have their own drawer ;).

Ah, the back yard. The fountain is very nice, huh? We can't wait to get rid of it ;). It has been funny to see real estate agents' reactions. Some look at it and then try to make some polite comment while underneath recoiling the way we do. Others think it is just the neatest thing ever! ;) And the bushes may not last as long as the paint color...

We do really like this arbor though. It has electrical boxes in the top so we could install ceiling fans if we want to.

After going upstairs you look straight into the master suite through double doors.

Another fireplace

This little deck is off the master suite

and has a killer view! This faces west so we'll get some pretty sunsets.

Master bathroom has a large tub and separate shower. The walk-in closet is huge!

Both of the other two bedrooms upstairs have full bathrooms attached. This room is big enough to be two rooms and was on the other floor plan we've seen. Doug is making plans in this picture.

This is the other smaller bedroom upstairs and will be the nursery. It will probably be painted in a very light blue. The green carpet won't last long either.

Here's the story of our house hunt:

We started house shopping in earnest, not just Sunday afternoon drives and occasional open houses, in October. We got pre-approved and set up with a Redfin.com account. (An aside - Redfin is awesome! If you're house shopping and they serve your area, check them out). We started touring houses that were interesting to us as they would pop up. It didn't take too long to know about what we wanted -- a house we could grow into and maybe even be there forever if we needed to, with a backyard for the kids and room to cook and eat family dinners. These may seem like simple requests, but they are harder to find in our area than you might think!

We found a couple houses we liked and made a few offers. One offer we made sat with the seller for 3 weeks before we heard (after calling nearly every day) that the sellers decided not to sell after all. :PP But it turned out to be a good thing because that delayed our purchase beyond the first of the year and - yahoo - the tax credit for first time home buyers was extended and even increased. Bonus.

While we were waiting f-o-r-e-v-e-r to hear about that house, we watched another one with almost the exact same floor plan come on the market and go into escrow very quickly. Bummer we thought - if we hadn't been waiting around to hear about this offer, we could have tried for that property.

We took a little break over Christmas and tried to get re-energized about the process. It can be so draining! On December 31, we saw the house that came on and off the market come back on! It must have fallen out of escrow we thought, and we immediately scheduled a tour. The night after we walked through it, we decided to put in an offer. We were already familiar with the floor plan and knew we loved it, and though there were a few quirky things about the house (i.e. the back yard formal garden), we wanted to try. Doug was pretty optimistic that we had a chance of getting it. I was pretty sure we wouldn't.

The house is in a little different situation that the usual "family selling home to move." We could tell by the sales record that the house had been bought in 2006 at the peak of the housing market for major bucks. Then in September of 2009 it was sold for dirt cheap -- we inferred that it was a short sale or foreclosure. Anyone that bought in 2006 at the top of the market is seriously hurting now. Now the house is on the market again at a reasonable price and is unoccupied. We figured a corporation bought the house maybe as an all-cash deal and was looking to make a healthy profit by flipping it around for a regular sale. We were right. Our agent confirmed that it had been foreclosed on and that a corporation was selling it. She warned us that situations like these weren't very likely to succeed, and that there were multiple offers and likely to be several rounds of counter offers. We submitted our offer on Saturday afternoon.

You can then imagine my surprise when our agent called Monday morning to tell us we got it! No counters or anything they just accepted straight up! Shock and amazement. I had to ask her to repeat herself several times. Seriously!? They accepted our offer? We're buying a house?!? I think our agent was even more surprised than we were. I had Ben in his high chair eating a snack when the call came. He thought I was the funniest/craziest mom when I went dancing and whooping around the house.

That's when the whirlwind began. We had to choose a mortgage broker in the next day or two, we had to choose an insurance agent in the next week or two, we had stacks of legal documents to sign (which the attorney in the family needed to study thoroughly). We're the kind of people that take months to decide what shoes to buy and we literally shopped for a year for our television. We had to make all these major decisions so fast -- it was stressful! -- but kind of an adrenaline rush at the same time :).

There were a few weird things about the house and a couple of scary moments. We had crazy huge rain storms for about a week. I went by the house one evening while it was raining just to check on things and see how the water drained away from the house. I looked in the window and there were several guys in there working on a wall, painting and stuff. I freaked out thinking they were covering something up or something worse. We called our agent and she suggested I just knock on the door and ask them what they were doing. So I did. Turns out they were just re-doing a patch job that we had noticed was rather poor in our home inspection. We didn't ask them to, they just did it. It looks a lot better now. Since I was in the house, I took the opportunity to walk around to all the windows and check for leaks around the ceiling. Everything looked fine, though I couldn't get to the room where the guys were working. I came back the next morning to see how their work turned out and to check on the house post-rain. Bad news - one corner of the carpet in the front room was wet. The previous owners had (stupidly in our opinion) cut a hole in the wall and installed a dog door. Not in an existing door, no, right through the stucco and dry wall on the exterior wall - a hole for their dog. Seriously people, what were you thinking? Well, when they left they did a terrible patch job and just slapped some caulk around the outside. We noticed it previously but the property was being sold "as-is" so we didn't think we could do anything about it. Now water was leaking in through that door and had soaked a corner of the room. We feared the worst, but got the best! The sellers agreed to remove the dog door, fix the patch and replace the carpet with flooring of our choice! Happy day! We wanted to replace that carpet anyway because you could see pet stains and we wanted to use it as an office/play room. Ben was not going to be crawling on that nasty carpet. Now we have a nice comfy frieze in a warm speckled brown which we will use to get a matching area rug for the great room. I was thrilled and Ben got to see the happy dance again ;).

The rain brought another problem though - the back yard turned into a lake. But the sellers took care of that too installing a water drain in the bottom of the puddle. They also fixed a light fixture that was on the wrong wall, cleaned our carpets, replaced an ugly bathroom mirror with a nice one (which we didn't even ask for) and patched the grass in the back yard. This is on a property that was supposed to be "as-is"!

Another moment of freak-out-ness came when our termite report was positive. But I must say before you all freak out too, that we're living in a former orange grove. Termites live in trees. Take away the trees and the termites move into the wood in the houses. The infestation was very small and has already been treated by the seller. We talked with people in the area and all of them have had termites. We have termites in our rental right now. It's just something that happens around here like the box elder bugs in Utah or the ticks in North Dakota. We'll just have to get our house checked regularly.

We're really thrilled with the house and spend at least an hour each night looking at our pictures of it, planning where to put our sparse smattering of furniture and thinking about paint. The paint is in fairly good condition, but we're not thrilled about the colors. We've been living in a rental where we dislike the paint color, so Doug said - this is going to be my house and I'm not going to spend one day living in it with paint I don't love. We're painting. It will be easier to do before we move in anyway. We also decided to install crown and base mouldings in the great room. It's an ambitious project, but Doug's dad is coming out to help us and it will make the room so much classier! We are having a blast looking at paint and moulding samples. Really, I think what makes it so exciting is that it will be ours.

Doug bought me a washer and dryer for Valentines Day and they are scheduled to be delivered to our new house in a few weeks! Eeek! It's way better than roses! ;)

The community we are moving into was only built up in 2003, so everything is fairly new. It was master planned and has lots of parks, pools and walking trails throughout the city. We just learned yesterday that every house in the city has high speed internet. It is part of the (crazy expensive) HOA dues we pay each month, but will be a nice perk! The city is full of young families with kids and we look forward to being close to families our kids can play with.

I'm happy to report that we are on track to close on FEBRUARY 10. Everything seems in order to close on time, though it is never a done deal until keys are in hand. Wish us luck! Only 8 more days!