There is a Season - Turn, Turn, Turn

I think we found our dream house.  Is it weird that I have a hard time saying that out loud in my current home?  It's treated us so well, I don't want it to feel bad.  Then I come to my senses.  Our house is over a 100 years old and has houses lots of families; our family is only one in a long string.  407 West Will is likely ready for us to move on too.  It has been a great home - and through baby J's eyes I see how cool it really is.  The traffic and train both irk me but his favorite word is "car" and he'll drop what he's doing to go watch the train come through.  What I'll miss most are my beautiful hardwood floors.  What I'll miss least is the neighborhood, or lack thereof.  

The new house is old - 1973 custom build.  Having had only one owner it's full of retro, ahem charm we'll call it.  Some of this charm will remain like tiled kitchen backsplash in a color that seems to be a mix of harvest gold and avocado green.  Some of the retro touches will be updated, two words:  wood paneling.  Lansdowne is bigger and quieter but I am concerned that J will have no action to watch considering there is little traffic and the windows though normal sized are tiny compared to our floor to ceiling windows here.  I'm so excited though.  I can't wait to walk the neighborhood, or access the city bike path nearly just outside our door.  I can't wait to be 10 minutes from everything instead of 30!  We're closer to D's work, and to my favorite local escape, Highbanks MetroPark.  

We close on both houses in just over two weeks.  All inspections and appraisals seem to be going smoothly.  We've moved on to getting quotes on painting and fencing.  We spent part of this past week appliance shopping and I have a stack of paint chips nearly as think as my copy of Twilight.  We haven't entered the period of stress yet.  Once the packing begins though - ugh, I'll keep that thought for another day.

I've been trying to write about this for some time but I can't quite get the feelings across and I'm quite tired of the lifeless postings here.  Below are some started and never finished posts on the same topic - each gives a few more details on the past month.

Summer Switch-up . . . 

The good news is that we got our wish - house sold within 30 days!  We weren't sure it was going to happen in fact we were pretty sure it wasn't.  We'd had only 4 showings in 30 days and were in the process of switching agents when it happened.  In fact, the evening we had our new agent over and were signing papers was the same evening our old agent stopped to pick-up his sign and key (awkward - they were there at the same time too).

Summer Saturday . . . 

It's a lovely rainy summer Saturday.  I only wish I could hear it - it being the rain of course.  Instead I'm hearing J squawk through his monitor as he keeps sleep at arm's length.  Once he quiets I'll still hear the blowing A/C right next to me.  One thing I hope to have in our new house is the ability to open all the windows and enjoy the outside air, even if it is warm enough to warrant using the A/C instead.  Here we live too close to the busy road and I'd rather have A/C than exhaust and soot which I find on my front porch so I know it would end up in my home if the windows were open.

We close on a new house in just a couple weeks.  It was the only stand-out of houses online that we knew we'd like.  We looked at it the first night of our four days of house hunting.  I loved it right away; it made me smile.  I could see us living there easily.  However, it was obviously out of our price range.  After getting a bit more information, including the fact the vacant house had been on the market all last year, we decided it didn't hurt to put in a low offer and have back-ups for the good possibility that we could not get into our price range.  Not only was our offer accepted (without a counter) but they've also agreed to all our conditions (including repair requests).  

We close at the end of July!