What have we been to the last month?

We MOVED!

 up the hill

Let's just say it has been more than a little crazy at this house since school started!

Why would we move next door you ask? If you want the story, here it is:

On the Friday before school started, we received a letter from the owner of our house stating that he was selling the house and would be putting it on the market sometime the following week.

WHAT?!

We were welcome to stay as long as we wanted until the house sold, but he want us to know.

Great. Thanks!

So we spent the weekend talking over options and finally thought we will stay here and see how things go since houses aren't really selling that fast here and it's going into fall when the housing market isn't as great as spring, so maybe we'll get lucky and nothing will happen until next summer...when we look for new jobs anyway, so we'll just look harder next summer...right!?

Fast forward 4 days to Tuesday. I get a call from the house Realtor....can we bring someone by in 30 minutes to see the house? Um NO! A...the house is on the market already (no sign, no warning)? Yes! It went on the market this morning. B....what happen to advance notice? Well, I guess you can request 24 hour notice to show the house...do you really want to be one of those people? YES I DO!!!! I have a newborn who take naps, and a life, etcetcetc....oh wait, I didn't sign up to sell this house with 4 days notice, so yes you can work around my schedule lady! (Can you tell I was already loving the listing agent!?..insert sarcasm!)

So after realizing that people already wanted to see the house after only a few hours on the market, we looked it up for ourselves. What do you know, the owner listed it for WAY under market value especially in our neighborhood (apparently he really wants to be done with rentals). Great...maybe we need a new plan. We decide we'll start looking at new rentals and see what we can find..after all, we have time....buying, selling,closing takes time right?!

As we start looking at rentals, we found out our neighbor (whose house was also on the market) was deciding to take hers off the market and rent it due to our house being so low and a foreclosure down the street which would both lower her appraisal, not what she needed, but perfect for us. After talking to her to see what she wanted and if she would rent to us, we took a tour of her house. We found that we like it better then the current house....it actually has grass in the backyard, the layout was better and with more room! When can we move in?

So started our crazy September. Our old house was on the market for 9 days. I showed it 14 times (notice I showed...since the listing agent figured if I was there to let them in, why show up? Which was fine since it meant I didn't have to deal with her quite as much). I spent two weeks packing whenever Aubrie would let me. Then once the new house was empty, Brian and I would stay up late as we would spend a couple of hours moving stuff every night after the kids went to bed (and we could do this since our new owner is super nice and let us move stuff in once she was gone, but not pay rent until we actually moved in. BLESSING!!)

Of course, there was inspections and appraisals in there as well. Oh, and did I mention Aubrie...our 3 month old...super easy to get stuff done with her around...plus school just starting! Not the best timing, but it worked out in the end.

We moved all the big stuff out Friday, cleaned Saturday (because when you want a deposit back you still have to clean super good even if the house is selling:( ), dropped off our keys on the 30th (driving the listing agent nuts with as long as possible...yes I was a brat by the end, but I put up with a lot from her, so she could just wait!) Our management company had the carpets cleaned Tuesday, inspected the house Wednesday and then apparently the house closed on Thursday as we had new neighbors working on moving in early Friday morning! CRAZY!!!

I definitely learned something about the whole house buying/selling process during this! Apparently you can get the whole process done in a month if both parties are motivated.

So how to I sum up our September?

We managed to get Dad back in his classroom and both boys into school and the whole family back on somewhat of a schedule.

We attended everyones open houses and met great teachers (or parents in Brian case for his school).

Aubrie reached 3 months.

And we moved...next door (not my favorite move by the way. If you are going to move...move more then 100 feet...makes it more worth it in my opinion....plus you don't drag it out as long).

Overall, we feel extremely blessed in how it turned out for us. It really is a better situation here and we love the new house, just didn't love getting here (especially our Internet disaster that left us without internet for like a week and a half..lovely), but we did it and slowly are getting all the piles unpacked.

One of these days we'll get a video tour done of the new house and let you all see how great it is. For now, we're tired and are trying to catch up on life, sleep, grading, school, homework, etc. So I promise it will come, just not a promise as to when.

Thanks to all of you who helped move us, watch kids for us, etc! We greatly appreciate all our friends and their help.

Here is to hoping for a slower, more sane October in our house!

PS. To all friends and family wanting the new address, change the house number to 312 and you'll have the current address.