The Most Awesome Home

Well... we got our answer on the house, and the answer was a "Yes!" We ended up getting the house that we wanted. Granted we had to pay a little bit more for it... but it is in the school system we wanted and the neighborhood we wanted. The house is much bigger than our current one plus we are paying less for it than we paid for our first home (with a better interest rate).

Is it perfect....? Nope, not by a long shot. There is a lot of fixing that has to happen - some cosmetic, some more serious. We learned there was a reason there were no pictures of any of the 3 bathrooms. The poor toilets, their curtains don't match their carpets (or more to the point... the lids don't match the bowls.) Don't get me started on the giant monstrosity of a fireplace that dominates the family room. Not to mention... (but I will) yet again, it looks like we will be having to put another roof on another house. Yay.

Do I love it....? Yep, I think I do. It has made me a believer in love at first sight, since I have only seen it (on the inside) once. That in itself is a scary enough notion.

Even though I have been preoccupied with all the things that a 'responsible adult' has to do to sell one home and buy another, the anticipation has been steadily growing. There is one thing I didn't take into consideration...how I feel about the house we are leaving.

While I'm excited for the new house, the title of this blog really belongs to the place we are selling this coming Friday. All the years I spent thinking about my dream house, I never appreciated the home I had.

That hit me like a ton of bricks Sunday night as we emptied our home of all the things that would be going with us - and some that won't. I walked through each of the rooms, listening to the echo of my footsteps. I tried to remember some memory to cherish from each of them.

Our living room, the heart of our house...where we spent countless hours playing, watching movies and loosing the remote. The room where Hailey took her first steps, by flashlight, during a power outage.

The dining room, and the floor remodeling job from hell - which turned out to be one of the nicest rooms in the house. The host to Nathan's weekly guy's night and the place where numerous pumpkin carving parties have been held.

Our bedroom...where I was privileged to watch my wonderful husband fall asleep with our newborn baby on his chest. Where Madison, The Most Awesome of All Cats... playfully batted away each tear I shed on the night of 9/11.

Hailey's room, don't get me started on the memories in there. Nursery murals, bedtime stories and princess castles....even finding the carpenter ants in the window sill - are now treasured memories.

Our kitchen, with its '4 year/ 4 coats of paint' cabinet repainting project - the place where the anti-vampire taco was born. Our entry to the house, and our exit....it all needs to be locked away in that special place where the memories are still as fresh as the day they happened.

I know it is a house of plaster, brick and in our case, really expensive shingles. You take the love that was in it with you. But it still somehow seems like a family member... like the most awesome of cats who now lies in its garden. You know that day is going to come when you have to say goodbye, but it is never easy.

Goodbye Most Awesome of All Homes, I hope they love you like we did.

Ten Years

TEN YEARS AGO....

10 Years ago, I had been married to Nathan for nearly 2 years. We were living in an apartment, and I was still trying to figure out my job at the library after loosing my first supervisor.

I heard about what was happening on the East coast, from a campus e-mail which said that a plane had hit the Pentagon. Trying to get a news site on the Internet was not working, as the surge in traffic had made them all impossible to load. On top of that, we did not have access to a TV in my building, so I sat in the station's office and listened to the radio. It made me feel an odd correlation to the people who had huddled around the radio during Pearl Harbor. The same sense of horrified, historical importance crossed my mind more than once. At lunch I walked down to the lake. It was so calm and peaceful, but I couldn't help but think about how much the events I had just 'witnessed'... were going to change the entire world. Although my life was pretty good, that day, the future seemed so scary and unknown.

It's 10 years later now. I'm still married to Nathan and love him more than ever. We were blessed with our beautiful daughter - when 9 years ago I was told I may never be able to have kids. I just got a promotion at the job that I was so unsure of ten years ago (7 supervisors later). I have been fortunate to get back into teaching color guard again, which has given me many amazing friends and great memories. We moved out of that apartment and bought our first home. Now, we will be selling it in a few weeks to live in the house of my dreams. My life has changed for the better in so many ways, I can't help feeling blessed. Hailey is even going to kindergarten in the same elementary school that I went to.

Most of us are fortunate that we only lost our naivety and inflated sense of national security on 9-11. Thousands of others lost so much more 10 years ago. I can only hope, on this day in particular, that they have been able to find some measure of peace in their lives. The sacrifice of so many and the heroism of so many more, should touch everyone of us in some way. We have been given the gift of perspective, the ability show our love to family and friends and the chance to make our lives what they were meant to be.

It took me 4 years before I could delete that original e-mail about the Pentagon. Like the rest of the nation, that day will always be burned into my memory. The feeling of loss was so overwhelming and the future seemed so frightening. I never could have imagined then that the next ten years would bring so much joy to my life. Every day is truly a gift. I hope that I remember what is most important for the next ten years as well.

The Final Puzzle Piece

OK..
Some of you know, some of you don't.... Nathan and I are selling our house.

Wait, scratch that. We SOLD our house.... essentially. All the pieces are there, we just have to sort out the inspection details and move out all our junk. This month has been, without a doubt, the craziest month I have ever experienced. Ever. Seriously.

We have wanted to get Hailey out of the school system, in which we currently live, for a long time now. It always seemed like we had plenty of time to make that move, but time has a funny way of catching up with you. The whole situation became far more urgent when I attended the 'Kindergarten Orientation' at her prospective school... just this past spring.

I was horrified. Yes I was.

Ask me sometime about the screaming mother episode I witnessed, or the fact that the school lost her 5-year-old for THREE HOURS before they found him.... unsupervised and outside the building. Wow...really? Sending your little one off on that first day, can be traumatic enough for a parent, imagine factoring in that you don't trust the school to even keep track of your kid. No thanks!

So this summer we got serious about putting our house up and moving. Well... when I say we got 'serious', we actually didn't get a fire under our butts until August. Once that happened though, things moved ridiculously fast - allow me to show you the timeline...

August 2nd - First meeting with our realtor. I like the guy, very nice, knowledgeable, good sense of humor and so tall I think people would pay money to have their pictures taken with him. He gave us a big 'real estate reality check' that boiled down to... "In order to sell in this market, be ready to price your house lower then you can afford." Crap. Not what we wanted to hear. Then, I find out from Hailey's school that they won't give her an out-of -district transfer until I have paperwork that proves we have bought a house elsewhere. This whole thing was not starting off the way we hoped it would.

August 5th - Regardless, we decided to put our house up at a higher price to see what would happen. We concluded that we were not in a hurry, but wanted list it... so we could get an idea of what to expect. If Hailey had to spend a year in the crappy school, at least it would probably only be for a year or so. Plus, her school had all day kindergarten ($$ bonus for us). We called the realtor and started the paperwork.

August 8th - This is that first time that I notice our house is now online. House cleaning begins now.

August 15th - The big 'For Sale' sign goes up in our yard. Neighbors that we barely talk to, come out of the woodwork to proclaim how much they will miss us. The neighbor on our left knocks on our door at 9:30 to check out our house and ask how much we want for it (yeah no joke).

August 16th - Professional realtor pictures taken. I clean the house for 3 hours. Photographer is a jerk, he takes pictures for 4 minutes and speaks only one word the whole time. I take my own pictures after he leaves.

August 19th - Pictures go online. House looks great - like a featured spread in 'Middle Class' Better Homes and Gardens.

August 21st - We have our first showing at 4:30 pm.* (*At this time, I began a full week band camp, so I was not around for the showing).

August 23rd - We get an offer on the house- one which would not put us in debt!

August 24th - Because I am at band camp and away from everything but my cell phone, we do not find out about the offer in until late Wednesday afternoon - on Hailey's birthday.

August 25th - We meet with the realtor to look over the offer and accept it at 8:00am. The closing date is September 23.... less then a month away. At 11:00 am, we schedule a showing at a home we would like to purchase. At 3:00, we put an offer in on that very home.

This all happened lightning quick... Nate and I felt like zombies all day.
Then came the bank's turn to move....and this is the point where things stalled out.

The home we want is foreclosed and bank owned. We put a offer in that was significantly lower then the list price (we have to pay closing costs and buy appliances) and received no word on Friday. While we didn't expect to hear anything on that first weekend... it has been over a week and we still haven't gotten a reply!! In the meantime, two more offers have come in on the same house. We are all bidding blindly - not knowing what the others have offered. When the second bid came in, the bank gave us a chance to change our original offer - which we did ($600 more than the asking price). I suppose that was nice on the part of the bank, but I would wager it was because the other couple didn't offer full price either. When the third offer came in... it became a whole different situation.

It feels like I'm playing sudoku - because I guess at that game too.

In my mind's eye, I envision our paperwork sitting on some bank representative's desk... and he's is laughing and twirling his moustache with his fingers. I wouldn't be surprised if the house is tied up to railroad tracks somewhere and they are just seeing who will pay enough to rescue it.

The bottom line is this - we sold our house. Now, we have to be out by the 23rd of this month... and at this point, we have no place to live. Until the bank give us a 'yes' or 'no' we can't move forward. Another weekend has passed (a holiday one at that) and the whole situation really, really stinks. The silver lining to all of this is that we accomplished our purpose in moving in the first place. Hailey will never have to go to that school which frightened me so much *insert wild enthusiastic cheer here*. In fact, instead of attending the school that we hope to be living next to... because of overcrowding... she is starting at the school where I went to kindergarten. Plus, her before and after school care is going to be with our very close, personal friend who lives in that neighborhood. The different parts of Hailey's schooling, fit together perfectly.

All the pieces have fallen neatly into place... except that big one right in the middle... and someone else has their finger on it. It shouldn't be this hard, I just want to finish the puzzle and see what the picture looks like.

*Update - still don't know anything about our offer, but in the time since I started this blog entry... I threw my back out at the grocery store. Excellent. Packing just now got a whole lot trickier.