House hunting in Salem

After leaving Clark with Nana, Brian and I and Logan headed for Salem, OR to look for a place to live and to put our belongings in a storage unit. We were giving ourselves a week to find something and to either move in or get all of our belongings into a storage unit for the month of July (as we decided to just stay with Nana and Papa or be on one of many vacations during that month).

We spent 11 hours the first day driving all over many different areas of Salem and the surrounding areas looking at A LOT of houses/duplexes/townhouses and didn't find anything that was even really a possibility. We were all extremely tired and done with the car when we decided to drive past one last location on our list of rental properties on the way back to the hotel at like 8pm. Besides being just a block away from the first LDS church we had seen, the house was perfect and absolutely beautiful, so we had hope again! We went back to the hotel and sent in an online application and emailed the office asking if it was possible to get keys first thing in the morning (so we could do more than just look in the windows). Well, the next morning, we checked the email to see the response that they had rented that house the night before......not good....Brian was especially not happy. We decided that we would just go sign the papers at the storage unit place we had found, so we could unload and get rid of the truck and at least have one less thing to worry about.

While Brian was signing papers at the storage unit, he received a call from a couple we had contacted a few weeks earlier about wanting to see their rental house. They had rented the house out the week before we came to Salem, so we had crossed them off our list, but their original renters fell through, so they called Brian to see if we where in Salem yet and if we were still interested in seeing their house before they offered it to anyone else who had put in an application (apparently we had been the first person to originally contact them, but because we weren't willing to rent sight unseen and they didn't want to sit on it for another week or two before we came they rented to someone else, but when it fell through, they felt they owed us a chance since we were in town now before they did anything else).

I went to meet Brian and the storage unit and we decided we would go drive by the house since it wasn't in the best part of town to see if the neighborhood was some place we could live before we wasted their time with a walk through. Well, when we drove by, the owners where there working on the house, so we stopped and talked to them.

Long story short, the neighborhood is alright (really kind of one of those ok little pockets in the older part of town) and the house was absolutely PERFECT! We put in an application and they accepted us just 20 minutes later. Since they were just finishing some work on the house and it was otherwise empty and we weren't really moving in until August, they let us move furniture and boxes into part of the house, so we didn't have to pay for a storage unit or move our belongings twice!

Basically, everything worked out perfectly and we were extremely blessed!

Here are some pictures of the house.....excuse the mess....we just piled where we could. We'll post better ones in August after we have actually unpacked and settled in.

Front of the house
View of the back and our nice deck (with the laundry room currently residing there since it is being remodeled).
View of our HUGE backyard from the house. I can't wait for Clark to get there. He'll be so excited to have a place to run and Mom loves that it's all fenced so she can just let him go.

(Through the little opening in the small fence you can see is a huge gardening area or digging zone for Clark depending on who you talk to.)

Living Room

Beautiful, BIG kitchen!

Part of the Family Room

Hallway with cute built-ins.