Home Sweet Home!

A few weeks ago we closed on our first house!  We have been house-hunting off and on since we got married nearly four years ago.  We've looked at MANY houses, put offers on several but nothing had worked out until this one.  We feel so blessed to have it and feel that we were led to it.

Every morning Chapter and I go for a walk in the desert close to our old house.  We walked just a couple of blocks and we were in leash-free desert.  The last few houses before the desert in this area are a really cute little neighborhood with really nice people and nice dogs.  One dog in particular would wait for Chappy and I every morning and go with us on our walk.  One morning in late September as we were walking home, I was thinking about this neighborhood and how fun it would be to live there.  Since there are only a handful of houses, though, it is rare that one comes up for sale.  In fact, it's been many years since one was for sale.  That morning I noticed one house in particular--a cute white elevated cottage with an unusual porch and a huge yard.

I thought to myself that whoever lived there must love it...and then noticed that it didn't look very lived in.  I didn't think too much more about it until later when I was looking at garage sale ads in the paper and a sale was listed for up in that area.  Joey said that there might be a sale at the house of the woman who had recently passed away there.  I asked if he knew the address or if it was the white house I'd noticed that morning.  He didn't know (and the sale wasn't at that house) but it got us thinking about that house.  We found out that the house I noticed was the one where the woman had lived and when we checked realtor.com (which we did at least daily) we found the house had just barely been listed and in our price range!

We called our realtor right away to see if we could go look at the house but we found that the owners weren't going to show it right away until it could be cleaned out.  We went up to look around at the outside a bit and ran into some friends of our who lived across the street.  They said the house was a good one and said we really couldn't go wrong with it.  We thought about it and prayed about it and felt really good, so we put in an offer without seeing the house.  It was accepted quickly and a few days later we were able to go inside.  We were pretty nervous but figured that the worst thing that could happen would be that we'd hate it and just lose our earnest money on the deal to back out.  However, when we went inside we were absolutely tickled with it!  There was wallpaper to come down and carpet to come up and things like that, but we loved the house.

(These pictures are all of our first walk-through when none of the things had been removed.)

Living Room

Living Room Looking Into Dining Room

Dining Room Looking Into Small Dining Room

Small Dining Room Looking Into Kitchen

Kitchen

Bathroom

From there we had several complications which are to be expected (other than the government shutting down in the middle of the deal), but at every bump things worked out, and often better than the original.  The sellers were patient with unusual circumstances and our realtor was an angel.  We closed on November 14th and our families came to help pack, move, clean, paint, etc.  People from church and other friends also helped and we were so grateful!

When we first came over right after closing, Joey carried me over the threshold (his own idea and quite romantic except that he had me over his shoulder and the car alarm went off in the middle of it...must have hit the keys in my pocket...still sweet, though) and inside we noticed some peeling wallpaper in the living room.  Joey pulled it and discovered it came off easily.  We cleared the wallpaper from three rooms before we went home that night.

Our apartment we moved from had been a wonderful first home for us and we had a great time there, but we're excited for this new adventure.  We have a lot of work to do and probably will for years, but we're excited about it.  Luckily it's too cold to work outside so I'm not torn too much between yard work and inside work.  Also, our visitors no longer have to sleep on the couch, so come to Rock Springs and visit us!  Bring a shovel...it'll be fun!  :)  (We won't really make you work unless you want to.)