Catch Up

So, It's been a while. If you followed us at our Old Blog, you'll notice there's a bit of a time gap between the last post and the post before it. Well, without being too boring I'm going to try to catch you up.

First of all we bought a house and sold the boat.

Then Jessi got a new job.

Then we got married.

Then our house started feeling small. We knew when we bought the house it was probably a 2-3 year house MAX, but it got us of the boat and that was the important thing at the time.

But just 1 year later (since Jessi and I can't sit still) we started going to open houses and dreaming of our next house. Where would we live? How are the schools? What kind of neighborhood? How much room do we need? How much room do we want? So many questions, yet so much potential.

We'd drive around on Sudays, browsing the open houses thinking "someday." It was a blast.

One day, we followed some open house signs through one of our favorite "someday" neighborhoods right up to this amazing house. As we pulled up, we thought, "This has got to be over a million bucks. But what the hell, one can dream right?"

Much to our surprise, it was way less... in fact it wasn't too much more than our "someday" price. So we toured the house dragging our jaws on the ground. This thing blew all the others out of the water. Instant dreams of living there. I mean this was THE one. It was almost too good to be true.

So as a joke, Jessi called her parents and proposed a business deal. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Wait... what? Um, OK? Really? We can talk about this? Wow. And the idea was born.

So with some incredibly generous help from Jessi's parents we were able to move "someday" up a few years. We ended up making an offer on the house and after some serious negotiation got a contract signed. All we had to do was pass inspection, and hey, the house was built in 2002 - no problem... right?

Wrong.

First off we have the best inspector in the USA. If you need a home inspection in the Seattle Area, call Cambridge Home Inspections Julie Rocks!! As she says, her job is to take the romance out of buying a house. And does she ever.

Ever heard of EIFS? We hadn't but Julie had - Google it. It's terrible. Also, the house was built on a hill and all of the drainage appeared to either undercut the foundation or work its way into the garage. Sweet.

Talk about disappointing. We walked, actually ran. The house was too good to be true. Our hearts were broken, but our eyes had been opened. We weren't going to let this get in the way of our "someday" house. We started looking more in earnest to see what else was out there.

We found another house we loved, but just couldn't come to an agreement. By the way, 3 months later, as of the time of this posting this house is still on the market. Boooo sellers!

Finally, after looking at every other house on the market in our price range we decided to shift gears.

We decided to buy a house in our favorite neighborhood that had good bones and a mostly good layout, but was priced a lot lower - and throw some money into updating it and making it perfect. Of course, neither Jessi or I have the time or knowledge to do most of the work ourselves, so we did hire a contractor. But even with a contractor, there seems to be a lot of stressful work to do.

But we'll get to that soon.

-Tom