Lots of Words & Our House Hunt Process

In our house, when Darrin and Miles talk a lot, which happens often, I say they are "using lots of words".  I feel like I have lots of words to share with you all.  So, so much has happened in the last month with moving, home DIY projects, construction, Lyme issues, etc.....and I still have some vacation recaps to finish. I definitely want to share the rest of our vacation pics even though we are two months after the fact.

So, I thought I'd offer a little recap tonight of what's been going, and then get into details in future posts. Shall we?

I left off a month ago with a sad little boy and pics of his going away party, which was the night before we moved.  The next day we spent a long, hot, STRESSFUL day of moving. You know the story...we've moved a lot.  We should be pros by now, but here's the thing...we thought we were going to stay in our last house for a long time, possibly forever. We moved in and set up shop. We bought furniture and I actually decorated. This is also the first time that we moved out of Martin. It's only 45 minutes away, but it made a difference.  So all these things made for a very long day.  The movers damaged several things and I was completely over it by the end of the day. Besides the emotional stress of moving, it was physically exhausting. Together with our families, we worked so hard.

Another thing...and I'm not even sure Darrin knows the full extent of my thoughts here....when we took possession of the house and actually got to look around without their furniture in it, I was a little taken aback by how much work I wanted to do.  My exact thoughts were "I didn't realize we bought a fixer upper".  I'm sure that sounds crazy, but the house wasn't quite as I remembered.  The decision to buy this house was always about the land and the addition that we were going to create, but I guess I just didn't realize how much work the house was going to need to make me happy and comfortable.

 (the view from our back patio)

With all that said, I know exactly how all this happened. We are so confident that God has lead us to this place.  This job, this house, this neighborhood, this city, this everything.  No doubts. If things change in a year or five years, I will still know that we are where we are supposed to be at this moment.

One detail I will get into tonight is a little about our house hunt.  Darrin and I have always been decisive when it comes to buying a house.  For those of you that may be new here, this is the fifth home we have purchased together. We have literally walked in a house before, walked around a few minutes, and said "looks good, we'll take it". We struggled to find something that we liked in Medina. It's an up & coming town and there are a ton of new homes and neighborhoods. We thought that would be perfect for Miles, but after looking, it just didn't seem right.  We loved the setting of our last house and how safe it was for Miles to play outside. I couldn't imagine when I would feel comfortable sending him out to play in those neighborhoods unsupervised. They were just too big and too busy for that.
 

It seemed that all the houses in Medina were literally on top of each other. Also, the houses were all the same.  One builder accounts for the majority of the homes around there and he uses 3-4 floor plans. Every time we looked at a new house, it felt like we'd already seen it before. It just wasn't setting well with us. We did find one that seemed pretty nice.

It had several things going for it....it was in a slightly less crowded neighborhood...it was just outside the city limits...it had a more spacious kitchen than any home we had seen...it had a nice outdoor space...it had a basement storm shelter...and it was just pretty.  When we felt confident that we had sold our house, we went back to look at the house for a second time just to be sure before we made an offer.  The strangest thing....as I was walking around, it just didn't feel right. I felt bad for feeling indecisive and for seemingly wasting our realtor's time. When I voiced my concern to Darrin, he was feeling the same way. 

We told our realtor that we were going to pass on it and asked her to set up some showings for the following weekend.  There were a few homes that we had crossed off the list without even looking, for one reason or another, and a few new ones that had recently come on the market.  One of the homes that we had previously crossed off the list was the home that we ended up buying.

Since I feel like I've used way too many words tonight, or "met quota" as we also say in our house, I'll cut it off here and pick back up tomorrow night with the decision to buy our house and why we love it so much. Good night, all!