Surprise (To Us Too!), We're Moving!

We love our home.  

It's our 1st home and we have been happy here for 5 years.  We love our ward at church and our neighbors on every single side.  But adding a 3rd baby to our family, with two older children who are fine sharing a room, but don't let each other fall asleep until way too late at night, plus my growing business that has taken over the garage, we need something larger than our cute cottage.

We are HGTV fans and Parade of Homes fans and have been looking at houses for sale, for fun, for a few years now.  When Tyson's mom posted a house for sale in her neighborhood, we went to look at it for fun, but not imagining it would be right for us.  But then we saw this and started imagining all the possibilities:

Click to watch on Youtube. 

If we finished the basement right away, there would be a bedroom for all of us.  Half of the garage could be used for my business (plus an office in the house) and we'd actually be able to park the van inside the garage too!  We would have a family room to play in and counter space in the kitchen and room for dinner parties.  The backyard was huge, the kids would be super close to grandparents, and a park is right across the street.

We couldn't believe we were jumping so quickly, but we made an offer and it was accepted. We put our home up for sale and it sold on Day 2.  We ran into a snag with this home when it appraised lower than the Sellers were hoping and they started to withdraw compromises (no repairs, no warranty, closing cost resistance, not even cleaning their carpet) to try to recoup the money they were hoping to get.  We totally understood the disappointment on their side, but it would not be wise on our side to buy a home for more than it's value or we'd be in big financial trouble in future if we decided to sell.  When they said they were taking all of the appliances out of the home too, we decided maybe this was not the home for us after all.  However we had sold our home so we needed to find something quick!  And we did.  A humongous house (and yard) in Kaysville.  I loved it!  But it was at the very top our top budget and not quite situated inside a neighborhood as much as we would have liked.  

We prayed a lot.  

The original home owners came back, willing to work things out.  We made a pros and cons list.  In the end, grandparent and park proximity won.  We heard it was a great neighborhood with lots of kids for our children to play with and a great ward.  So we made the leap, signed the papers, and bought us a new house!

Here are some more photos in case the video doesn't work.

Of course we will be doing some remolding to fit our family's taste, but that will be in a later post.