Our (Soon to be!) New House

I'm sitting here in our empty house, it's our very last night here, and I thought now would be a perfect time to give you all a little tour of the house we are buying in Lincoln.

We are excited about this house! I have to say, though, that when we went to look at it, we had no intention of making an offer on it. We were actually taking a little breather, trying to make up our minds if we were going to put an offer on a completely different house, and we went to look at this house on a whim because we were kind of curious to see what the inside might look like on a house whose outside looked so deplorable.

I don't know, something just clicked when we were looking around. This house felt like it could be a home, although I have to admit it clicked for me a bit sooner than it did for Todd. He was actually walking around making fun of its dilapidated condition with our real estate agent and was rather shocked to hear that I thought this was the one! However, he soon came around. I think the fact that we were able to get it for a rock bottom price warmed him up considerably, and then once it became clear that we could do a type of loan that would allow us to wrap up most of the major renovations into our mortgage, he warmed up completely.

And it really is exactly the perfect fit for us. It's old, it's a fixer, it's a two story, it's in the neighborhood we wanted to be in, you know, all the things we were looking for, and by the time the dust clears with all the re-fabbing, we'll actually be ending up with a pretty nice looking old house. A dream come true. And for a price that won't break our bank. Yay!

Are you ready to see it?

This is the front of our home of homes. Not very pretty, right? But picture it with lovely new vinyl siding and a new roof. We're considering a color scheme of chocolate brown, creamy taupe, and gorgeous deep burnt orange.

And here's a side view. I'm not sure what the previous owners were thinking with the mustard yellow, but I'm ridiculously excited about this hedge of bushes separating our property from our neighbor's!

The back. As you can see, there is no exit on the back of the house. We'll be replacing that small window (which is above the washer/dryer in the kitchen on the inside) with a door, and relocating the washer and dryer to the upstairs bathroom.

Can you believe this is our garage? It looks pretty scary now, but it too will be completely refabbed with new siding and a new roof and a very nice carriage-style garage door.

So that's the outside...ready for some inside pics?

This is the door leading into our living room from the entry way. Look at all that lovely wood!

This is a view into our dining room from the front door. The little room beyond the dining room will start off as our family room and then eventually end up as a small library with floor to ceiling bookshelves. There has to be a place to put the 40 boxes of books we just packed up!

The kitchen


The living room

Lolly on the stairs

Lolly in the upstairs bathroom. This tub will be moving downstairs as part of a future bathroom/kitchen/laundry room renovation.

This room will be the girls'. There's an unfinished sunroom/porch beyond the door which I think will probably end up being their playroom.

The spare room

And last but not least, our bedroom. We have a little sunroom as well through those french doors. Pretty fun, huh?

So that's our house! The pictures aren't that great, but I think you can still get some idea of where we'll eventually be living. The inside of the house is actually in pretty good shape - just a lot of cosmetic work to be done. But we're up for the challenge. My mind is already teeming with lots of ideas - I can't wait to get in there and get to work!

End of Days

Our house is sold!

I've been wanting to write about it for awhile, but there have been so many what ifs and doubts and fears clouding my brain these past few weeks as we've waded through the craziness of inspections and appraisals and trying to find a new house in Lincoln and all the subsequent craziness that has come as a result of actually finding a house in Lincoln, that at first I was too afraid (it appears I have some growing to do in the faith and trust department) and now there just hasn't been a lot of time!

Everything has turned out fine. Is that not usually the way it happens? I worry, worry, worry, and usually for no good reason other than to make myself looney. Our buyers have received their loan commitment, and there was only one "minor" setback which resulted from our inspection. We had to install a radon mitigation system which came as a rather unpleasant and expensive surprise. Fun! But as a sort of off set to our irritation over our radon issue, Todd received a lot of compliments on his professional-looking basement finishing skills from all the various people who've been in our house during the last four weeks which was nice to hear considering all the blood, sweat, and tears (literally!) that have been poured into that space - especially in the last six months! So now we are on track to close next Tuesday and meanwhile are knee deep in packing boxes and piles of our stuff.

Here's a picture of the current state of our living room:

Our basement looks pretty much the same. For a family that purges on a regular basis, it seems like we still have too much stuff! How is that possible?

The next few weeks are going to be very busy and very bittersweet for us as we wrap up things here. Todd is leaving after work this Friday to move all our stuff to Lincoln, and then turning around and coming back Saturday so that he can be here for our last Sunday at The Summit (sniff!). Next week we close on Tuesday, Iris has her preschool Christmas program on Thursday, and we leave to move to Lincoln for good that Friday morning. And crammed into all the nooks and crannies as much as we can, there will be lots of goodbyes (temporary!) to people and places we love.

Along the same lines, the next few months are going to be some of the most stressful of our lives as we make this incredible life transformation into church planting. Nothing about our life is going to look the same which can be at times a very terrifying and overwhelming thought. We covet all the prayers we can get, so please, please pray for us! We would love to make it through this time without losing our minds and with our family still intact.

I'll try to post if anything changes, and I still want to post pictures of the house we'll be buying in Lincoln! I've been wary because I don't know if it's actually OK to post pictures of a house we don't technically own yet. We have a contract, but we're doing a special kind of loan in order to incorporate some of the repair costs into our loan, and we're still waiting for all that to get approved by the bank. We're super excited about this house and the neighborhood it's in, but you have to promise not to laugh when you see the pictures. I swear this house has major potential!

Our crazy Lolly turned the big two today.

Happy birthday, sweet girlie!