Early mornings

Mornings are hard for me, always have been. My mom once told my college roommate, "Don't talk to her before she talks to you in the morning" and my roommate said it was the best advice anyone has ever given her. Not that I'm a monster in the morning. I just have to wake up before I can function on any level. I grunt a lot, move slowly, basically do my best sloth impression. And since having kids, that hasn't really gotten any better. So one day, a little over a year ago, I had a decision to make: Sleep in until the kids wake me up and be monster mom OR Set an alarm and get up before they do and be a much more functional mom. As hard as it was, I decided to set the alarm. And every day, I hit the snooze button way too many times, but somehow always get my tush out of bed before the little guys. I make a pot of coffee, check email, play a few games on Facebook, and if I'm lucky, get a little peace and quiet time where I can wake up before the little monsters - I mean, darlings - get out of bed. During the fast paced days, crammed with squabbles and playdates and all things crazy, it's easy to get all amped up. These little moments of quiet, time just for me, are a necessary part of my life that even now, I'm just starting to appreciate.

What a wild ride

This time last month, we were just beginning to pack up the townhouse. Just beginning to to feel the stress this life choice was bringing to our lives. We were just starting to think about what things we needed to bring with us to live in someone else's home for six weeks, what things just needed to be sent to storage. We were beginning to daydream about what our forever home might look like, what features were important for us to have. And by this time next month, we will be settled into that forever home.

After the speedy sale of our townhouse, our agents immediately lit a fire under our house shopping expedition, and sent us through 15 different places. That's a massive number considering the state of Seattle's housing market, but just a tiny fraction of the houses we looked at before buying the townhouse. This weekend, we went and revisited two, finally deciding on one. We made an offer, she accepted with minimal haggling, and we are having our inspection next week. If all goes well, we will close 4 days before we are set to move out of our borrowed home. Bananas.

None of my crazy fears were realized. We found quite a few nice places in our price range.  We didn't end up in a bidding war resulting in an inflated price. And we won't be homeless when our time runs out at the borrowed house. I cannot express how relieved I feel. In the middle of last week, I was very down about the entire process. Our agents kept telling us that all the homes we'd seen the previous weekend had sold with multiple offers and for more than asking (a lot more), and that we needed to be looking at homes with a lower list price. To say those houses were less than desirable would be an understatement.

But none of that happened, and in a few weeks, this will be our new, forever home. Phinney here we come!

The race is on

The inspection is over, we agreed to their terms, and now we can finally put in an offer on a new house, a forever house. Unfortunately, we haven't found said house. EEK! If we get an offer in and accepted this weekend, we still have a chance to close in time to move in before we need to move out of our temporary home. To say I'm worried would be an understatement. I've been looking for rental units, just in case we can't find something, but that market seems to be just as difficult as the for sale market. What is going on in Seattle!! Well, if worse comes to worse, we can still move in, temporarily, with family. If so, I hope we don't drive each other bananas! =-)

I'm in shock

Our first home.

I haven't had a chance over the past week to update on how the move went or about the crazy cleaning spree after the move that required us to shuttle two grumpy, though fairly cooperative, boys back and forth between playdates and grandparents while trying to get a billion and one errands done. It's just been too hectic. But here we are, not even 24 hours after our house listing went live, and we have one offer in (above asking) and another possible offer coming. This is all happening so fast. Maybe too fast? I don't think I'd emotionally gotten to the point of saying goodbye to this house. I expected it to be on the market at least until the open house on Sunday, so when I went to take the garbage out yesterday and there were already two agent's cards on the counter, I was really surprised. When our agent let us know last night that she had received a call from someone looking to put together an offer, we were dumbstruck. Now that there is an offer (which expires at 5pm) and D hasn't even gotten home from preschool, I'm pretty sure my brain is going to explode. Guess we shall see what comes to pass.

Sad to see you go . . .

Even the stuffies get in on the fun.

Quite possibly the one thing we have been the proudest of, and will miss the most, is our climbing wall. It began as a joke when we were originally house shopping: "I like this house, it has a nice kitchen, big yard, 27 bedrooms, but where would the climbing wall go?" Then last year for D's birthday I gave  him a set of climbing holds, sort of as a gag gift. He ran with it. Within a month, that wall was erected in our 2 story stairwell. Now, every kid who comes to our house scampers up that wall as soon as they're in the front door (a few grown ups have too!) It's also created some great bonding time for my boys and their daddy.

We'd originally thought that we could put a sign on it telling potential buyers that the wall could stay or go, their choice. But when the stager came through, it was one of the first things she said to get rid of. D pouted for a few days, but ultimately was happy about it since: a) deep down he really wanted to keep it, and b) if it had to come down sometime, better for it to happen before the painters came through rather than after.


So up he shimmied with his drill all ready to take out the screws holding it in place. He designed it to be easy to remove (see, I told you he really didn't want to leave it behind), but unfortunately, a few of the screws didn't get the memo and that you-know-what was a blankity-blank to get down! Oh well, it is down now and even left smaller holes in the walls than some of our shelves! And I got a great view while D was working. ;-)

Buried in Boxes

With only 4 short days until we will officially be moved into our temporary home, and we are completely surrounded by boxes. I'm starting to become melancholy. This is the first and only home we have ever owned. We did so much to personalize it, things we couldn't do in a rental, like installing a climbing wall. As I go from room to room emptying all our treasures into boxes, I'm frustrated and stressed. But when I stop to look at naked walls and empty shelves, that's when the reality of our move truly sets in. Tomorrow the moving truck comes for the big furniture and boxes, so I really should be doing more packing, but somehow, I just can't. The emotions are pretty overwhelming.

On the one hand

Back in 2010, when we were house shopping previously, we had our choice of properties and must have looked at more than 100 before we chose our lovely townhome. This time around, not so much.

As you can see, there are fewer houses in our price range on the market than schools in North Seattle right now. I'm trying not to be discouraged, especially since we haven't even officially listed our house, but since I'm more of a long-view type of person, I am worrying about our ability to buy a new home in a timely manner.

But on the other hand, in our neighborhood, west of I-5, there are absolutely NO townhomes for sale.  And only one east of I-5! There are tons of townhomes in our neighborhood, it's just that most of them were purchased at the height of the real estate boom here in Seattle. While we are experiencing an upswing, it hasn't come up enough for all those homeowners to make back their investments, so they are holding on to them. We, on the other hand, purchased at the very bottom of the market, quite by accident. It just happened that we were able to buy in 2010, not before, so we will get our entire investment back, maybe a bit more. And since we will have virtually no competition in this neighborhood, maybe a bit more than a little? Keep your fingers crossed, because that little bit more may mean we will be able to find more houses on the market in our price range further down the line.

Now back to packing. UGH.

First world problems. . .

  One of the joys of moving to a new place (read: horrors!) is what to do with all the food we have on hand. During previous moves one of the following happened: 1. plan move way in advance and eat everything in the stockpile, 2. be a poor student so there never was a stockpile.  This time around, we didn't really "plan in advance" the move, and I'd started getting into couponing. (Quick sidebar: I never did the hoarding part of couponing, but I did stock up on things that we used regularly when it was on sale.)

So, we are fully stocked on food and we are moving in just over a week. EEK!! As you can see, I have a standing freezer to go along with the unit on our fridge, plus we have our pantry and canning shelves to clear out. I was just over at the house we are moving into that our very dear friends are loaning us for about 6 weeks, and they only have the under-the-fridge unit. I'm not real worried about our pantry stuff, I can box that up. And the stager wants my canned goods to stay on the shelves. It's all that frozen stuff I'm worried about. How can we possibly get through it all in such a short period of time?! My best guess is that we'll be eating from there, morning, noon, and night until the move, and possibly giving some away to friends and family. Let's just say this hasn't ever been a problem I've had to deal with before, and I feel so blessed that it's a problem now. There are too many people in this world who don't have enough to eat, thankfully, even with our tight budget, our family isn't one of them.

La Sigh

I had such grand plans of blogging all about our home redecoration project over the course of the summer, but something happened on the way to the hardware store: the real estate market when through the roof here! We've been outgrowing our townhouse steadily ever since we bought it two and half years ago, and our oldest REALLY needs a yard and I'm sure little brother isn't too far behind. I've also been pining for a garden as well as a full sized couch (the whole living room/dining room combo thing only allows a love seat.) So when the opportunity to move into another home, but only for a very specific time frame, for low rent while our townhouse would be on the market came along, we just couldn't pass it up.

GULP!! So we are working on packing up our home and moving into someone else's while we try to find our forever home. Since we are looking for a cosmetic fixer, my dream of blogging about home renovation will someday come true, but for now, I get to blog all about the joys of moving and house hunting in a seller's market. Yay?

One project down

I've been teasing my friends on my Instagram feed with little sneak peaks of our garden wall project. They've all thought I was crazy as I collected tomato cans over the past few months (I had a monster tower of them in my hall!), but I love how it all turned out (and that hideous view is GONE!)

If you can remember, this is what the view out my back door looked like. I hated it, especially during the dark days of winter when we were all stuck inside. The biggest problem here is that this fence is in the small space between our townhouse and the next group of houses, so it gets very little sun. Also, being our pocket yard, I didn't want to take up too much space with planters. Then I found a great little photo on Pinterest.

I loved how with colorful pots, I didn't need colorful flowers to make this space interested, and I began to search for pretty pots. No matter what kind of pot I looked at, I couldn't find a cost effective way to put some colorful pots on that fence. This space is 12 feet long and 6 feet high, so I needed a huge number of pots, and even at $2 per pot (the cheapest I could find), it was going to blow my whole redecorating budget on this one project. Not cool. But then I made dinner and saw the two tomato cans sitting on the counter and realized that those 28oz cans were essentially the same size as the pots I'd been looking at, and they were *gasp* FREE! It took awhile to collect the 34 cans I needed, but once I had them, it was just a matter of spray painting and using a drill to solve my ugly problem.

And here it is, completed with plants and lanterns. I've hand those darned lanterns for years, but never put them up anywhere. This is an awesome use for them! I can hardly wait for summer to come so I can add candles.

Home Improvement

We've been living in our little townhouse now for two and a half years, and I'm itching to move again. It's strange, I lived in the same house for the first 18 years of my life, but guess that vagabond lifestyle that comes with changing homes every few months in college just stuck with me. So instead of completely packing up and moving to a new place, D has compromised with me and we are going to redecorate. =-) I smell PROJECTS!!

So I've been scouring paint chips and looking through magazines, and I think we've got a plan. What's the first stop going to be? That hideous view out my back door! **Please forgive the crooked photo. It's such a horrible view, I'm surprised my camera was willing to focus on it!