One Year Frenzy-versary, Part Six: Our First Christmas in the New House (2008)

Blogland is slowing down as everyone's schedules are speeding up. Not sure if I'll get to our master bedroom curtain dilemma before Christmas. We're going to be out of town until New Year's, too, but I'll be back with Christmas 2009 pics, the master bedroom window deal, and some trim! Careful now, don't fall - I know you're on the edge of your seats :) So in light of the busy, busy weekend - just photos for this one, guys - although, I do have to say... wow, check out the previous owner's window treatments :) Good thing happiness doesn't depend on nice curtains (or a straight tree topper), eh? This was two weeks after we started moving in. Thanks for reading and...

Merry Christmas!

One Year Frenzy-versary, Part Five: Moving In & Working On The Previous House

One year ago this week, we were sleeping in the "new" house on air mattresses. At least, Sam and I were. If memory serves me correctly, my brother-in-law had helped Sam move the children's twin mattresses and box springs over in the van. Does that sound right? Maybe it was just the mattresses and not box springs. Anyway - we were sleeping here and it was a crazy, crazy week of back and forth, loading stuff into the van and unloading it again at the new house.

We had received the keys on the evening of the 7th (a Sunday) and some of my friends and I had started cleaning pretty much right away. We listened to Christmas music and scrubbed our little hearts out. Friends are so great, aren't they? By Monday evening, we were starting to move things over, and we were officially in the nasty, nasty "transition" period in which neither house is home.



Let me give you a little tip. If you plan on making a move from one house to another house that's only 30 minutes away... you still need to pack as though the move were across 3 states. It doesn't seem like that should be the case, but trust me, it's the case. From Monday through Friday, we decided I would just go back and forth from the old house to the new house and take things as I could. I would just put them in laundry baskets and storage bins. I'm not kidding. Remember, now, Sam would be at work at this time. And my sister, although close, had a 6 week old baby and really wasn't available to help (plus, as my poor mom reminded me, she and Daddy had their own hands full an hour north - a flu bug had her in the hospital to get an I.V.!) So - the children and I were going to move the small stuff. What on earth were we thinking? I'm usually so good at visualizing details and working through a plan systematically in my head beforehand. Apparently, those powers failed me last December. It all went down like this...

We'd arrive at the old house, all the children would pile out of the van (then ages 7.5, 6.5, 4, and 22 months) and I'd hurry and put as much as I could into my various containers, load the containers and the children into the van, drive back to the new house and unload it all in the kitchen/entryway, and then drive back and do it again. With the driving, the loading, and the unloading, each trip took about 2 and 1/2 hours. I did that 2-3 times per day for those first 5 days. Friends, believe me, this is an insane way to move. Never, ever try it. Pack and use a truck like normal people. Good grief.

We did rent a truck on that Saturday, December the 13th. We brought over some of the larger furniture, but not all of it. We were planning on leaving some of it so the old house (which still wasn't quite on the market, yet) wouldn't have to show empty. I think we had chosen a realtor at this point, and we had still been working on the old house, getting it ready to sell. Remember my yellow paint swatches on the kitchen wall?



Well, they were in the family room, too.



Which meant we had some painting to do before the "for sale" sign went up. We planned on getting to it during the time Sam was taking off of work around Christmas and New Year's. While we're on the topic of getting the old house ready to sell, here's what I was doing the week before we moved...



Because our previous home was a new construction, we had had plenty of landscaping work to do after moving in five years ago. This little area was planted the spring of 2008 - we never even got to see that sweet redbud bloom. This was the first half of a pretty long bed. The second half curved around the corner of the house and met up with the deck. We planned on planting it the following spring. Woops - but then we bought a house. Better figure out a quicker plan.



So, while the little ones napped (you can see SweetP watching me through the window), I covered the area with weed barrier fabric, put some stepping stones down (which we already had - score!) and...



...filled in around the stones with pea gravel. Sam connected the area to the existing flower bed later on by filling in between with topsoil about 3-4" thick. There you go! Suburban Ohio landscaping in December, ha. It would certainly show better than a weedy, muddy mess, anyway.



So, the gravel project was on the 3rd, I think. We got the keys on the 7th, moved in the most inefficient way possible from the 8-12th, and rented a truck to move some larger things on the 13th. I don't have any more photos of the whole process until we get to Christmas Eve 2008. I guess we were busy or something. It was nuts. We made it, but it was nuts. By the time my in-laws were visiting on the 27th, I looked like this -



Let's just say that I am very thankful we aren't moving this Christmas :)

So, the next Frenzy-versary post will be a look back at our first Christmas in the new house and (finally!) putting our previous home up for sale! By the way, for those who are concerned, it did sell. We don't have two mortgages any longer, praise God. More on that later...

Hope you're staying warm!

~Jacci

P.S. When I write Frenzy-versary posts, I hope you know I'm not after some kind of weird pity. It was a wild time that, honestly, didn't seem nearly as wild *at* the time. Looking back, though, I wonder exactly how we did everything that we did. The answer, of course, is that the grace of God is sufficient. He is our Strength and our Song. We're the ones who decided to jump in with both feet. The Lord graciously gave us what we needed to carry us through and let us come out smiling on the other side :) Our One Year Frenzy-versary celebration is about looking back at this time last year and remembering all the craziness that went on in 3-4 months time, but even more than that, it's a testimony of the Lord's faithfulness and provision.


Thanks for celebrating with us!

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 4: Blink! The Title Is Ours

Yup, that's right. No joke. On Black Friday of last year, the 28th of November, we settled on the house. Somehow, in the last two weeks of November, we managed to scoot the original early December settlement date up and close before the end of the month - decreasing our interest pre-paid out of pocket at the outset. It definitely helped that the sellers had not been living in the house for the last six months, so they didn't need time to pack and move their things out. Very handy :)

My sister and her husband watched the children for us while we went to settlement and then headed over to the DMV to have our driver's licenses changed. The sellers were out of town for Thanksgiving, so we just signed our end of the papers and that was it. The agreement was that we would receive the keys on December 8th, after they returned. December 8th. Do you remember that we first saw the house on November 9th???

They had our signatures. They had our money. We had just bought the house.

Ready for the funny part? We still didn't have our current house on the market, yet. We had to pack everything up, move it, paint a number of rooms in the "previous" house, finish staining a deck (did I mention it was December?), do some exterior painting, finish a half-done landscaping project, interview a few realtors, and then put the house up for sale.

Ha.

So, you could pretty much say that the next two weeks (at least) were pure adrenaline. Well, okay, you're right - 90% adrenaline and 10% insanity. God is very, very gracious.

After we picked the children up from my sister's house, we went right home and got crackin'. Little Dude went down for a nap, and we went to work on our rather alarming list of things to do in order to get the house "show ready". These photos were taken on November 28th of last year.



Sam decided that a high of around 50 degrees was good enough for some staining (and it actually took fairly well, although dried slowly).



The girls and I headed down to the basement to try to sort through the junk down there. What to keep and take with us? What to give away? What to donate? What to pitch?



Then, I lugged the "what to keep and take with us" pile up the basement stairs, moved the living room furniture out of the way, and started using that front room as the official space for our packed-and-ready-to-go stuff.

The packing and moving plan was as follows: we had already been packing since our contract had been accepted (around November 19th), and we had ten more days to pack before we got the keys to the new house. So, we'd pack, get the keys on the 8th, clean the new house, gradually move smaller things over to the new house between the 10th and 13th, rent a moving van on the 13th and move most of our larger furniture; however, we did decide to leave some of our better pieces so the house would not have to show completely empty. Then, Sam would have to paint at the previous house while I focused on unpacking at the new house. We'd be at around a 2 week countdown for Christmas - and Sam's Mom & Dad were coming to stay with us for a few days.

I'm cracking up as I'm typing this. Did we actually do all of this?

That was the plan. And, can you believe it, that's what we actually did.


Frenzy.

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 3: You Put A Contract On It?!

I shared a few weeks back about how we had first come across this house, and how we were not at all thinking of moving at the time. We first saw the house on a Sunday in early November (the ninth, actually, my birthday). After determining that we could, technically, swing two mortgages for a while we decided to schedule a showing with a realtor. The way that I remember it, we saw the house with the realtor two days later on Tuesday.

It wasn't so much that the house was gorgeous. The house we were living in at the time was only 4 years old and much nicer, really. We were the only ones who had ever lived in that house. We bought it when it was 4 months old. It had 2800 sq. ft., lots of light, everything was brand new, and the subdivision pool was only a short walk away. There were walking trails, a fishing pond, and shops built at the entrance. It was a quiet neighborhood, nice families, a gazebo on the main boulevard, for pity's sake. In a lot of ways that whole housing development had the Charmed Life thing going on...



So, what were we thinking leaving it all behind? Well, it's a little complicated to explain if you haven't been in our shoes, but our house was 30 minutes away from the rest of our life. Literally. My sister and her young family were 30 minutes away. Sam's job was thirty minutes away. Our church was 30 minutes away. My closest friends were 30 minutes away. Everything else in life (except for our house and parents) were in the same town, 30 minutes north of where we were living.



We had moved to Ohio from a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the time, living 30 minutes away seemed like a dream. What a luxury to only have to drive 30 minutes! Sam had all too often commuted an hour and half one way in Virginia. My closest friend there lived 45 minutes away! After a few years of living in Ohio, it was becoming clear that not everyone in our new home was used to that kind of driving. Friends confessed that our house felt like a looooong drive away, and the two hours on the road each Sunday (a morning and an evening service) were starting to feel long to us, too. My sister had gotten married and moved away the year before. She had also had her first baby in early October. I missed her. With four kiddos of my own in tow, 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back was a little hard to work around with regularity. This "new" house was a 2 minute drive from her home :)

We weren't considering buying this house because it was bigger, prettier, fancier, or better in any way other than its location. We wanted to buy this house so we could be closer to so much that is important to us. Family, friends, church, and closer to work could mean less time driving and more time home. We knew that by moving to that town and by owning an older, less attractive home, there would be some losses materialistically speaking. But, those losses didn't even begin to outweigh the gains for our family as a whole. 9 foot ceilings gave way to a 25 year old tri-level... in just the right place.



In just a few words, we knew life isn't all about big houses and stuff. They can be nice, don't get me wrong. A part of me does wince a little to look up from these photos of our previous home only to be face to face with our real life home - damaged wood floors and sparkly gray toilet seats from 1983. There's so much still to be done, I can wonder why we made the choice we did. Ultimately, though, I know it was the right one. These few years of WORK making this house more our own will be nothing compared to all of the benefits for many years to come. Ours was a case of giving up the good to get the better.



So, after getting a quick preapproval for a loan and after having some "financial people" double check our numbers for us, we put a contract on the house. I can't remember exactly when, but it was within 10 days of that initial visit. It was quickly enough that, when we told our friends and family, they all unanimously responded with the proper level of shock. "You put a contract on it?" We did. And, after a little going back and forth to get the price down to where we could swing the cost, our offer was accepted.

It was about 10-14 days after we first saw the house on November 9th. That means it was around November 19-23rd. We were scheduled to close at the beginning of December, so packing started immediately. Crazy, crazy.

Happy Frenzy-versary :)

P.S. We like to keep our actual city of residence on the down-low. If you live in our area and have a pretty good idea of where we've lived or are currently living, please do not name the cities in your comments. Thank you!!!

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 2: November 9, 2008

Last year, November 9th fell on a Sunday. Little Dude was still pretty under the weather from a recent sicky bug, so Sam and I decided to switch off for church. By that I mean that I went to Sunday school, then he came and went to the morning service with the three girls. In the meantime, I needed to figure out what to do with Little Dude for over an hour (we lived 30 minutes from our church at that point).

Before I go on, I should probably give you a little background information about our market history. Between Spring 2006 and Winter 06-07, we had our house on the market twice. We took it off the first time because I was pretty sick with the first trimester of Little Dude's pregnancy. We went back on the market when I was up for it again, but then went off two weeks before I was due to deliver him. We wanted to move to the town where Sam worked, our church was, and also a large number of our friends and family lived. But, it just didn't seem like the time. Our house wasn't getting much traffic and we weren't finding a house that we were excited about buying. We wanted land, but we wanted to be close to other families. Things just weren't lining up. We took the house off the market, had our son, and decided to settle in until the housing market improved.

After Little Dude's first birthday, though, my friend Dayna kept on us. Whenever a house would go up for sale in her neighborhood, she'd pipe up and tell us all about it. At that point we had decided that a move was put on the backburner for a while. We had tried. It hadn't worked. We weren't really feeling like being on the market for forever in this economy. I kept telling her, "no dice", and she kept mentioning new houses.

So that Sunday morning, Little Dude was coughing and too gunky to take to church, so he and I wound up driving through the country and through the town our church is in. Dayna had recently told me about another house up for sale in her neighborhood. I drove all around her house, but I couldn't find the home she had told me about. So, I drove down the main road a little further, toward my sister's neighborhood.

There was a large wooded section along the left side of the road. I wondered aloud whether there might be any homes for sale that backed up to that property. You know, just out of curiosity and just to kill time. I turned left and drove along the wooded neighborhood street. A little more than halfway down, there was a "For Sale" sign. The sign said "Four bedrooms" and it backed up to those woods. Hmmm.



There were two men out in the front yard, hanging shutters up on the front windows. They saw me looking at the house and came over to the van to see if I had questions. Now, before you think I'm a complete nutso, you'll just have to know that this is a safe neighborhood in a pretty safe part of a safe Ohio town. The safest we've ever lived in. The crime rate is nill here. Anyway, to make a long story short, Little Dude and I wound up walking through the house while the men waited outside. It was larger than it looked from the outside. It had nearly an acre. We knew the street, and had admired the neighborhood when we were previously looking for homes, but there hadn't been any homes for sale in this neighborhood then. I took an information sheet with me, thanked the men, and went back to pick up Sam and the girls from church.

When Sam came out to the parking lot after the service, I was reading the information sheet. They were definitely asking too much for the house, but it was intriguing nonetheless. I had timed it - this house was a 2 minute drive from my little sis and her husband. Interesting.

Sam thought it was more interesting than I expected. We all wound up driving back over to the house so he could get out and look around, too. The men were still outside and very politely let him in to check it out. When he came out, I could tell his wheels were turning.

We didn't have our house up for sale at the time. We had no intentions of moving within even the next three years.
But, that night, all we could think about was how close we'd be to everything - and an acre of woods. Our kids would think that was heaven on earth. Just for fun, we did some number crunching that night and were surprised to discover that, if we got the seller to come down $20,000 in price, we could carry both the new mortgage and our current mortgage at the same time. We wouldn't be able to add to our monthly savings and we'd have to make some cut-backs, but we could do it. Once we figured that out, we began to think more seriously.

As I remember it, we went to bed that night (the night of my 33rd birthday - we had celebrated the night before) with a tentative plan to go see the house "officially" with a realtor. As we talked in bed, we said things like "well, it's worth checking out, I think" and "You know, just to see". But, deep down, we were starting to feel the adrenaline creeping up.

5 minutes from work.

7 minutes from church.

2 minutes from my sister.

An acre of woods.

Interesting.

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 1: Late October 2008

Have I ever mentioned how quickly we bought this house? Or how we weren't even looking for a new house at the time? Or how we had not placed our current house on the market at all yet - nor were we intending to do so? Have I mentioned that the entire purchase and most of the move happened within four short weeks?

Frenzy, y'all. That's about what the activity level was like from my birthday in early November 2008 up until oh, I'd say...now. The Frenzy-versary is just a look back at Fall 2008 and early Winter 2009 and all the craziness that ensued ;)

Today's post is the last photo I have in my computer files from before November 9th - that fateful birthday (yes, I found our house on my birthday!).



This photo was taken in this week of October 2008. We had friends over to bake a geography lesson. See, if you homeschool you can both bake and eat your geography. In the younger grades, at least. Here we are making Continental Divide cookies.

In the background you can see that nothing is packed up. All is happily chaotic in my kitchen with seven children (some of which must have been napping at this point) enjoying the dough and paint swatches on the wall. I was still decorating that place! I had abolutely zero clue we would be living in a completely different house before Christmas.

Wild.