The Road to Get Here

It has been one crazy week!

We moved all of our stuff out of our apartment and into a storage unit last weekend, stayed with some friends in Waco for a few days while Kolby finished school, and moved into my parents' house on Thursday night. Kolby landed a part-time job on Friday morning and then we looked at 10 houses on Friday afternoon, made an offer on one on Friday night, negotiated the price on Saturday, and signed a contract for a new house on Sunday!

Kolby has loved teaching English these past two years, even more than he thought he would, but he is certainly excited about having a break from full-time employment. The graduate program he'll be starting in July will carry a time commitment of about 20 hours a week so he had been looking for a job to fill the rest of his time. On Friday, he interviewed at a college prep place for a position to teach classes for the verbal section of the SAT test. As a male English teacher, Kolby seems to be a hot commodity (this was true at both the schools he's taught at and rang true for this place as well) so he was able to lock in that job with ease and will teach some classes this summer as well as during the school year. It sounds like a great gig for him. Once again, the Lord provides.

And now for the house hunt story. We started casually looking at neighborhoods pretty soon after I applied for a job back in April. I knew the job was a long shot, but we didn't want to be way behind in the search for a place to live if things did end up working out. Anytime we would be in the area for one reason or another, we'd drive around and weigh the options for various cities and even neighborhoods within those cities. We landed on a particular location pretty quickly. It is actually the neighborhood that Kolby grew up in before they moved when he was in 4th grade. His parents have several good friends that still live in that area and they all rave about how great the neighborhood is and how well it has held its value over the years. The more we drove around it--- the more we fell in love with it. It has a great variety of houses--- there are some big expensive houses that help support the home value of the smaller houses like the ones we were looking at. The vast majority if the neighborhood was built in the late 1950s so the houses are old and unique-- and all of the lots are covered in awesome mature trees. There is a great park that is right in the middle of the neighborhood and every street has sidewalks on both sides so its a great place to go on walks and spend plenty of time outside, especially since all of the trees provide shade from the blaring Texas sun. Basically, it's just an awesome neighborhood.

So, we'd been looking in that neighborhood for awhile and we would look at houses online and once we found a handful that we liked, I would try to make appointments to see as many as I could and then just drive up for the day while Kolby was at school. There were also a couple of houses that we found online and asked either my parents or Kolby's parents to go take a look at them for us to see if any were worth a trip up to see them for ourselves. This was a pretty frustrating process because the houses that we liked would usually go under contract before we were able to see them in person. Where we were looking was such a popular neighborhood and the sections of it that had affordable houses for first-time home buyers like us were insanely popular because of the 2009 tax credit. At various times we had gotten our hearts set on a house only to see it get snatched up before we could do anything. By the time we moved up here on Thursday, we were confident in our decision to buy a house in that neighborhood and were hoping things would have a much better chance of falling into place now that we were in the area and ready to make an offer as soon as we found the right house.

This past Friday we spent most of the day looking at house after house after house. A local realtor showed us several, and then we just drove around the neighborhood and ended up looking at a couple more by just calling the phone number on the For Sale sign in the yard. As we were about to head home we happened upon this super cute house that was listed at a price a bit out of our range. We decided to call about it anyways, and this sweet family let us come in and see it. It was love at first sight. The whole time we were walkling through it Kolby and I were exchanging this dropped jaw "oh-my-gosh-this-house-is-awesome" look behind the seller's back. It was so perfect it made our stomachs hurt. At the end of our tour of the house, the seller told us that they had just dropped the price THAT DAY by $6,000 and that because we hadn't signed on with a buyer's agent that they would take off an additional $6,000 (this is the amount they would have had to pay to our realtor if we had one). Seriously?!?! We made on offer pretty much as soon as we got home and we signed the contract on Sunday after church. The house is so much more than I could ever have hoped for! We are bounce-off-the-walls excited about it.

This post has already gotten insanely long, so I'll post more details about the house itself another day. Hopefully by then I can get some pictures of the inside. We're so excited!!