So about the house(es).
11 days ago, Matt and I decided to take Friday off. We’d had a busy week, culminating in our Halloween festivities, and we wanted some time to relax and work around the house. And that’s mostly what we did. A few weeks before I’d seen a flyer from the same builder who built our house, advertising some new models in a neighborhood a few minutes from our house. So knowing that we both enjoy checking out real estate like this (kind of a real live HGTV), I suggested we maybe go see them sometime during the day. But it was pretty far down the list.
We ran errands, had lunch, did Good Will drop off, elementary school pickup and then preschool pickup. As we were on the way to Ben’s school, the idea revived itself as we saw the signs pointing us to the ‘hood. Both kids in tow, we went to check it out.
Now here’s the thing … we have been toying with the idea of moving for a long time. But we love our house and our neighborhood. We once even went so far as to bring in a real estate agent and start putting our house on the market, but everytime we started down that path, we stopped short and went home. Whatever we moved for had to be near PERFECT, fulfilling a pretty substantial wishlist:
- more square footage
- but with a vastly better layout
- better “daily” storage
- larger garage
- same school matriculation area
- proper pantry
- good neighborhood feel
- good outdoor space
And when we went into these models, we just started checking things off one by one.
So we’ve gone forward. We’ve done research. We’ve started planning and scheming and writing checks and it all seems to be falling into place. We’re putting the house on the market in February. We hope to close by March. Our friends bought a rental place this past summer and we are planning to rent it from them until our house is finished.
In between all of this, we have to get our house ready to sell, including some painting, new carpet upstairs and a reasonably long list of (mostly small) repairs. We have to get our house ready to stage, which means we have to remove almost all of the “stuff” in it. We have to make decisions about our new house, which, while fun, is a bit stressful. And we have to keep working, going to school, turning in homework, celebrating holidays and on and on.
It’s going to be a crazy ride.
The best of luck!!