Home Owners at Last!

Well.  It's been five months.

I've never missed that much time on this blog.

So I guess this is proof that my life kinda crazy right now.

We bought a house and had a baby ... and are only just now feeling like we can breath again.  Not because everything is done, but because everything is livable and we need a break from projects.

We bought a real a fixer upper.

See, as the weeks were closing in on us and the arrival of our third little sweetheart came nearer, we felt the pressure to buy.  Our poor Realtor was running around the valley finding all sorts of houses for us to walk through.  East side of the freeway?  Or west side of the freeway?  Big house and a commute, or small home and more time with Mark?  More inversion, or more snow?  More young families, or more variety?  Spend money updating a cheap fixer-upper or spend money on something brand new?  Rambler?  Multilevel?

The list went on and on.  Three days a week we went out with our Realtor and walked through about 10 houses each day.  Belle was in the thick of her war against pooping, so I packed out gobs and gobs of underwear and wipies ... and we got to test out plenty of toilets in the homes we toured.

This went on for about three weeks.  Then we finally narrowed it down to two homes.  One immaculate rambler on the west side of the freeway, and a smaller but newly rennovated multilevel on the east side.  Mark was smitten with the rambler.  We put in an offer.  A really good offer.

We did not get the house.

Even though I felt a bit relieved (I wasn't sold on the neighborhood), going back to look at our multilevel felt disappointing.  It was just ... small.  We decided to look at another home in the same neighborhood (really wanted to live in that neighborhood), slightly bigger and definitely dumpier.

Literally dumpier.  It was like one big cat and bird dump.  (The owners were old and loved pets, but didn't believe in cages.  Or litter boxes.)

But ... I kind of liked it.  The main floor was much more open.  The living room could fit a sectional (one of our lifelong dreams) and there were three bedrooms upstairs and a completely unfinished basement full of possibility.  The layout made sense for a family of young kiddos; big enough for little people and small enough to be a typical starter home.  We could make it work; we could make it ours.

It just need some love.
A lot of love.

So we spent the day going back and forth from the fixer-upper to the rennovated home ...
And decided we'd kind of like to be forced to do our own updating.

Nobody else wanted that dumpy old home, so we didn't have trouble making an offer.  On October 27th, the house was ours, and we began the mad dash to get new floors, clean the ducts, and paint the walls before we moved in.

We had only two weeks before my due date arrived.