A year in review...

Disclaimer...this is my first blog.  It's meant to document certain things in my life that my friends and family might be interested in.  We are going through an extremely crazy time and my organized, structured world has been turned upside down.  I'm not trying to push my views or thoughts on anyone.  I like what I like and don't like what I don't like.  I type exactly the way I would have a conversation with you and I don't spell well.  There...that's out of the way!

One year ago today we sold our old house and moved in with my in-laws.  I was fully on board with putting our house on the market since we had our eyes on a new house in town.  We went to visit it 4 times...and then...found out that there was another offer.  We still held a glimmer of hope since the offer was contingent on the sale of their home.  Being the crazies that we were (Type A...remember?) we went to the open house of our competitors and believed that our house would sell much quicker then theirs.  Sadly...we came in 3 days behind them in our sale (I'd like to add that our sale only took 3 weeks which was record breaking at the time!).  Still, we found ourselves semi-homeless but still decided to take the plunge assuming our dream home would come on the market any day. 

(This is a picture my AMAZING old neighbor snapped of the family on moving day.  My neighbors are the one thing I will miss the most.)

So we (ahem...I) packed up our small 3 bedroom house in record time.  My days consisted of packing one box at a time, feeding my 4 month old, keeping my toddler busy, working two days a week, and crying.  It...was...awful.  I had high hopes of keeping everything organized.  Fail.  I wanted to label every box on every side.  Fail.  I wanted to just get through the month.  Which I did.

(A little hard to see...but this was the only picture I snapped on moving day.  It's me following the trailer that was piled high with all of my belongings.  Super scary driving behind that!)

We made a smooth transition into my in-laws house.  We are extremely lucky that they have the room to house the 4 of us and Fenway (our dog) plus all of our crap.  And they don't mind us living with them!  We have taken over 1 garage, the entire basement, two bedrooms and every other available nook and cranny.  Space is tight...but it could be a lot worse and we don't have to pay for storage.  Of course I fought to have all of our stuff in a local storage area so we didn't take over the entire house plus I thought it would be easier in the end to move back.  But my husband (being a true CPA that he is) crunched the numbers and wanted to save every penny if we could.  He ended up winning...because he promised me I could buy something for the new house with the money we were saving.  You bet I'm holding him to that.

We started looking at new houses a couple of months after we moved in.  We thought a ton would come on the market in the neighborhood we wanted.  Month after month we were discouraged.  We realized we needed to broden our search outside of the only two streets in our old town we were considering.  Yes, you read that right.  We were only looking on two streets!

Long story short, our amazing realtor found an expired listing for a brand new house in a surrounding town.  We had a meeting with the realtor and the builders and decided to go for it!  I couldn't believe we were actually building a brand new house in an amazing neighborhood.

Here we are on the lot we picked after meeting with the realtors. This picture was taken before we actually made our offer.  My husband shook his head and declaired that we lost all of our barganing power.

Little did we know...there were a lot of changes coming in the next few months.  Changes to our plans, changes to the lot and changes in the time frame.