House news

First, to the dear, wonderful, supportive, ladies in my life: no, I was not referring to you in my previous post. The mothers I mentioned, the ones so busy bragging on their own kids that they failed to remember that we are all imperfect beings, are too oblivious to have realized they could have possibly done anything wrong. You ladies are too inherently HONEST and self-aware to have been the women I was speaking of. Thank you for your kind emails and IM’s. You are true friends.

Now… house news!

Last Saturday we signed an extension on our current apartment lease so we could stay here until June 19th. The very next day a house came on the market with 4 bedrooms, a finished basement, a “decent” yard, and in the Superior elementary school district- in short, every thing we have been waiting for. It was also well within our price range.

We ran out to see the house that day and made an offer on it Monday morning. Monday night we received a counter offer and accepted that offer. We signed the documents yesterday (Tuesday) and have the inspection scheduled for Friday. If all goes well we’ll close May 24th. We agreed on the longer closing time due to our newly signed lease extension but also because the owner has a daughter graduating from high school in May. Since we are flexible on our move date, we felt it was the decent thing to do- letting them stay in the house until she had graduated.

Pictures!

This is the front of the house.. and Ian.

One of the upstairs bedrooms. There are three bedrooms, including the master, on the upper level.

A very bad picture of the master bedroom. There is a 5 piece master bath attached to the room plus a walk-in closet.

The other upstairs bedroom. This will probably be the boys room- once we get rid of that glaring turqouise paint.

This is an open loft area on the upper floor where the bedrooms are. Since the built in bookshelves convey with the house, we're going to make this a play area for the boys.

The kitchen doesn't really have more counter or cabinet space than my kitchen in Springfield, but there is room to expand it along the left wall if we choose to.

The stairwell. Why is every house in this neighborhood painted that mustard yellow? Argh! The formal dining space is at the base of the stairs. Oh look, Ian snuck in the picture again.

This family room/den area connects to the eat in kitchen.

This nook area is beside the front door and the formal dining area. We are going to make that area our home office.

The right side of the long room in the basement. I have no idea what we'll put in that corner, since we don't have exercies equipment. It might become a mini-library.

The left side of the basement. This side will definitely be set up similar to how the current owners have it. To the right of the picture are the sliding glass doors that walk out to the backyard.

The left side of the backyard. As you can see it's not really big, but it has plenty of room for a swingset. The house is also located on a cul-de-sac, so it will be safer for the boys to ride their bikes out front. The deck is a trex composite material and large enough to have a patio table , several chairs and a grill- effectively doubling the backyard entertaining space.

I'll let y'all know how the inspection goes. It should be easy to check for roof leaks and drainage around the property, since we got 15 inches of snow last night. It will all be melting by Friday.