More House Pics

I realized that I didn't have many great shots of the kitchen as a whole and some other rooms as well. Since I haven't finished cleaning up and putting away, I'm sharing pictures from the listing which are pretty dang good. Again, not our furnishing, so be nice.

Here's a full shot of our lovely kitchen. It's pretty awesome. There are lights galore - ceiling, above cabinets, below cabinets, IN the glass cabinets. Everywhere.

This is the small, but helpful dining area in the kitchen. We've not had an eat-in kitchen since 2 houses ago. If we could ever stop using our current table as a dumping ground for stuff, it'll be an adorable place to sit for a quick dinner. And within eye shot of the TV!

Dining room again. I seriously wanted their table.

Rear family room. This picture doesn't do it's length justice (that's what she said).

Front living and dining room. This will be a great space "for entertaining" if I'm being as HGTV as possible.

The master bedroom from another angle. Don't let the picture fool you, this carpet is even BETTER in person. Also, the room is NOT this bright. Not even close. Ever.

Master shower. It's lovely.

Our three-season porch. We will love this one day. Right now, we have no furniture for this room so it's pretty much empty.

Backyard. We'll most likely add more grass one day. Neither of us see much use of a horseshoe shaped walking path around a floating patio, but that's just us.

Contemplating Contemporary

I've gotten some requests for pics of the new house and because it still looks like something blew up, I'm going to post pics I took during one of our first showings. So keep in mind these are the former owner's furnishings so don't judge! 

These are in a massively random order because I'm too lazy to put them in order at the moment. Take what you can get, folks. 

Welcome to our 1986 Contemporary! 

This is a corner in our front living room. We currently have a much smaller TV where their giant one sat, but I enjoy the view to the upstairs hallway.

This is a handy built in bookshelf and cabinet in our rear family room. It's a bit dark, but I will paint that sucker white in the semi-near future (when I paint the brick fireplace).

This is a view down into the front living room from the upstairs hallway shown in the first pic. It's a lovely large room with a vaulted ceiling.

This is the downstairs half bath. Over-improve much? I love indulgence in a half bath.

This is our foyer as seen from the front living room. Oh how I wish it had those beautiful hardwoods rather than tile, but each is well done and well maintained so I'll take it.

This is the master bedroom. Complete with blue carpet, yes. Like I said, don't judge.

This is the garage. It was immaculate. Freshly painted floor and lawn mower parked on plastic sheeting to keep it clean.

This is the dining room. I wanted to ask for their table, but didn't have the nerve. Also, that's a stocked wine fridge over in the corner. It didn't come with the house. Bummer.

This is the make-up counter in the master bath. The husband lets me use it from time to time.

This is the master bath. You can't see it, but there's a motorized skylight in the middle of the ceiling. We are loving the creative use of space that gives us so much cabinet storage!

This is our GAS STOVE in our new kitchen. Complete with granite slab backsplash. I've fried an egg or two on the stove, but have yet to cook a whole meal on this baby. It came with a griddle insert, too. #pancakesssss

This is the laundry room. To the right of the rug is the door from the garage into the house so this is like a mudroom. We have front loaders on pedestals so this room looks a lot fuller with our machines in them. I will paint those cabinets white one day.

This is the decorative cabinet above the gas stove. I don't have anything inside the glass cabinets yet, but I have some blue glass pieces in the spotlit area above.

Pardon their mess. This is the only walk-in attic space. It's off the master bath which is kind of convenient and also tucked away. It sits over the garage and it's plenty large without being so huge that we think we can accumulate a bunch of crap.

This is the view down the upstairs hallway from the bed in the master bedroom. Picture a sea of light hardwood floors and white trim. That's what's in this hallway's future.

This is the stairwell photographed while I was standing in the upstairs hallway. This railing is going to be redone because it's only up to 1986 code, not 2013. Also, our Westie fits through the slats so picture this railing with tons of moving boxes flattened and leaned up against the rail. That's where we're at now.

This is the shower in the master bath. It's lovely and I love it. I only get to shower in it three times a week because I'm at the gym showering the other four.

This is another part of the kitchen. We have fancy high-end appliances by Dacor. I have yet to use either of them.

This is the only other full bath other than the master. This one is upstairs and is small, but gets the job done. I am not a fan of the tile and may use my $1500 in free tile from The Tile Shop to redo this baby. Just the tile, the rest is spotless and lovely.

This is the foyer as seen from outside the half bath downstairs. There's a hallway from the front door to the kitchen which passes by the laundry room and the half bath so that's where this pic was taken. The door frame on the far right is a lovely coat closet that's HUUUUGE compared to what we had in our last house.

This is the half bath! Told you about over-improvement. I can't figure out what to fill those cabinets with!

Another shot of the stairs.

This is also in the master bath. Across from the shower is the toilet and more lovely cabinets. We keep sheets and towels up in there. The bottom cube has a pull out laundry hamper basket thingy.

The dining room. The wall with the large painting was the perfect spot for my beloved china cabinet and one of the reasons I knew this house was perfect!

And lastly, here's the fun little fountain that sits outside the front door. It's all clean and lovely and functioning here, but right now, in reality, it's full of those nasty wormy things that fall out of oak trees in the spring. Also, the plants are in need of severe pruning. However, this is a gem at night - see the landscape light? They are all around the front of our house and I love it.

Hope you've enjoyed the scattered tour!!!

New Beginnings

I feel like a broken record when I sit down to compose a new post. "I've been MIA .... It's been a long time since I last posted.... Long time, no write" and so on and so forth. Let's just skip the obvious and get to the good stuff.

Lots of stuff has happened since 1.22.13 - the date of my last post.

For one, we sold our house! YAY! We finally went under contract on March 21st and while it still feels so fragile, we've made it past the point where everything fell apart with our last buyer. In fact, the week we went under contract we most interesting. We received a LOOOOOW offer on Tuesday and were in verbal (email) negotiations with these buyers when ANOTHER offer came in on Thursday for full price. We took the no-brainer and accepted their offer pronto. Too bad so sad for those other buyers. That's what happens when you offer $37,500 under list price when list price is virtually spot-on with what market value seems to be.

Last Thursday they had the inspection and we were so nervous that once again, that day would be the day they'd back out. Last time, the day of the inspection, no inspection happened and no one told us. It wasn't until we got home and felt that no one had been there and we checked into it that we were told she was cancelling the contract. Grr. But whatever, it happened last week and these buyers seems to be serious about going through with it. Next up, the appraisal and we don't know when that is scheduled for yet. After that (if we get a satisfactory appraisal) we may feel like we can breathe and perhaps start packing!

Which leads me to the next bit of news - we're under contract on a new house of our own! YAY! After we went under contract on our house, we scheduled a full Saturday (my birthday, actually) to see homes. I think we went to 8-10 homes. It was a FULL day. Turns out, the first one was the best one and we made an offer a couple of days later. They accepted our price ($20k under) and we were shocked. Great news for us, though! I am very excited. The inspection is tomorrow and hopefully we don't find any deal breakers. These sellers are so meticulous so hopefully they've maintained everything to the nines and nothing major will need to be repaired. Still, we have the appraisal for that house to wait on and that's just nerve-wracking for us after what we went through last time.

Here's a pic of the exterior -it's a 1986 contemporary - very different from our 2007 bungalow! I don't want to push my luck so photos of the rest will come after we close!

I'm Such A Dork

But I have to point out that my photo of my YHL book is part of the collage of reader photos in today's YHL post about their book bid-ness.

We were in the car. Hubs pulled over to the mailbox and there is was in a little book-sized cardboard mailer (you can see that underneath the book in the pic). Aww, I feel spay-shull.

Buyer's Remorse

Things have been craptastic since I last updated.

First, they got better. Then they got ... well ... craptastic.

So our lunatic buyer miraculously came back a few days later like a grown ass woman and resubmitted the offer we had previously negotiated over email. It was a Christmas miracle! Her agent claimed she had "worked it out with her son" and all was good in the world again and just like that - we were under contract.

We went UC on January 4th, just in time for some house hunting on January 5th. Which was fun, but stirred up a whole mess of confusion in our heads. I won't get into that, though.

The following Friday, January 11th, my office was supposed to close at noon to have a transformer repaired. This closing was announced the previous Wednesday and in my excitement I scheduled lots of showings and a meeting with the builder of a home we liked to discuss customizations. THEN the office decided to stay open and work on the transformer on Saturday, but alas, I took the afternoon off anyway.

So, Friday we saw a couple of homes and then went to a meeting with the builder. We went through our laundry list of wishes and hopes and dreams and he took note of them all. Sometimes saying "No prob" and others saying he'd run it past the boss. Sweet. All good. Then we went over to see the house again. They've built a spec house of the plan we like so we went there to see it in person again and come up with more tweaks we'd like to make. Again, fun. To see it finished and all cleaned up was great and just got me that much more excited to build our own, special version of it.

Part of this story includes the inspection of our current house by our looney buyer. The inspection was scheduled from noon to 5pm on Friday, which made our house hunting and meeting with the builder even more timely.

After our day of fun we headed back home. When I walked in, everything looked just as I left it. Almost TOO MUCH like I left it. Almost like NO INSPECTION HAD ACTUALLY TAKEN PLACE. I mentioned it to the hubs and he emailed our agent to get confirmation from looney's agent that the inspection went down and went well.

WELL, around 8pm our agent forwards us an email from looney's agent time-stamped 7:42pm that the buyer was TERMINATING THE CONTRACT. WTF? Yes, you read that right. She changed her mind. It just took her several visits to the house to confirm her "gut" feeling that she wanted to back out. heh. I'll give you a gut feeling, you crazy B!

So just like that, and on the day of a great meeting with the builder, we're back at square one AGAIN.

I was so .... something ... it was hard to even feel an emotion over anger. WHO DOES THAT? Who puts in an offer on a house they've seen at least three times and THEN waits another WEEK to TERMINATE? I mean, maybe if you were normal and you put in an offer with no fuss - but this lady drug us through the mud. She low-balled us $25k on her first offer, then came up $5k but wanted about $3k worth of personal property. Then when we finally agreed she bailed on the offer. Then she comes back and all seems good with the world. She put in a short due diligence period which seemed like a good thing. Maybe her $100 due diligence fee should've tipped us off. I just can't believe it. Had it not happened the very day we FINALLY met with the builder, I might not have had such a horrible reaction.

I went to bed pissed off. I woke up at 5:30am still pissed off and unable to go back to sleep for a while.

I hate square one. And I hate MM who works at SAS. She's a moron.

News

Gee, it's been a while since I've posted, huh? Well, there's a good reason for that. A reason I've not really wanted to share, but now I just feel like sharing so here goes.

We put our house on the market.

I know, I know. WHAT?!?

But some stuff happened and we just decided to go for it. We listed the week before Christmas because we are GENIUSES! We had an open house the very first Sunday and five couples came through in just 2 hours. Pretty good, huh? One lady seemed smitten (we weren't there - this is reported by our agent) and we thought we might get an offer. A week goes by and she FINALLY schedules a 2nd showing. After that, radio silence again for a couple of days. Then finally she submitted an offer on Christmas Eve and we were told via text by our agent on Christmas day. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO US!

We reviewed the offer the next day and were totally disappointed. After having only been on the market three weeks, she low-balled us $25,000 under list price. Yeah. IDONTTHINKSO. We submitted a response to her offer (different than a counter offer) basically saying, "We reject your offer, but if you rewrite it more like this we'll look more favorably on it." To that she responds just $5,000 more but now she wants a s**t load of our personal property (all my rugs and all my curtains). Again, IDONTTHINKSO. We were ready to hang up the towel on this lady but with some calm advice from our agent, we wanted HER to walk away, not US. She finally came up to our rock bottom and we accepted.

Her next job was to resubmit her offer and then we'd be under contract. Well, easier said than done. She pulls out of the deal because her 18 year old senior-in-high-school son refuses to come see the house (or move for that matter). #?%#$#:"?#@$:" SERIOUSLY?

Since when do teenagers get ANY say in what house their parents buy? I never did! And this kid is going off to college in the fall so what the heck does he care anyway? Words cannot accurately describe the number of emotions I had at that moment. Dumbfounded, pissed, shocked, but also I was totally laughing at her for her horrendous parenting and ability to stand up to her 18 year old! HUH??

So anyway, now we're back at square one with no offers. We've had some showings but so far no bites. It's frustrating because with an offer so close we (or at least I) had gotten into find mode hardcore so it's hard to just drop that and feel like we can't look right now because we've not sold.

Sigh.

So that's the latest in our world.

Revelations & Renovations

This post is only going to have one picture. Can you handle it?

I just felt like sharing something....

This past Saturday, hubs and I spent most of the day riding around looking at neighborhoods and houses for our potential move. Yes, that's right. We thought about moving. AGAIN. But (spoiler alert) by the end of the day, we decided to stay put. Let me back up a bit and tell you how this came about.

In the last few months there have been a few odd happenings around the casa. Happenings that left us feeling a bit unsettled and wondering about our safety and that of our house and baby, Three. The happening that left a rotted cherry on top was last week when an (illegally) parked car on the empty lot across the street caught on fire at 1:30am. YEAH. Coupled with all the other weirdness (read: stolen plants, clarinet stashed under our house) we kind of thought "should we get outta dodge?"

So, we investigated. Basically, for me anyway, by the end of the day, I had a renewed appreciation for our house and its location. We saw some nice homes, but they were either in a far out location or they just weren't as great as our house. We both decided we'd rather put a chunk of change into our current house that put a chunk of change down on a new house. Especially because we JUST custom renovated our bathroom! It's hard to look at builder bathrooms after we've lived with one great custom bathroom for 2 years and now have a new one. Nothing measures up!

The exciting part is that we're meeting with our favorite GC again tonight to discuss ..... LIVING ROOM and KITCHEN renovations. We are aiming for the stars, but willing to come back down to earth depending on the estimate.

Our current kitchen is great and we really love the IKEA cabinets and quartz countertops. We have a great pantry and lovely windows looking out to our back yard and patio. BUT. I've always wanted it to be an eat-in kitchen. I've printed our floor plan we received from the original builder back when we bought the house and have drawn on our proposed changes.

Right now, we have a small screened-in porch off the kitchen. We're thinking of enclosing that to enlarge our kitchen. We're also thinking of splitting our "office" downstairs into a new walk-in closet for the guest bedroom and an office. We don't use it a ton now so splitting it wouldn't really cramp our style. The current closet in the guestroom would get closed off and (hopefully) accessed from the kitchen. Because it sits next to our current pantry, we'd like to merge the two and make one large pantry or perhaps something like this (photo from House*Tweaking) which has a little workspace:

Lastly, we may be able to close in a walkway from our garage to the house. As it is now, we have to go outside to get inside the house from the garage. It's never really been an issue because it's just a few steps, but it'd be nice to have dry access to the garage if we can! 

The living room will have fairly minor renovations. Mostly just changing one wall where the fireplace and TV are. We hope to remove all or part of the wall that separates the living and kitchen spaces for a more open feel. 

The possibilities are very exciting, but we'll have to see what the damage is before we'll know what we're going to do. 

The best part for me is the revelation that I DO love my house and I DO want to stay in it. Even if we have weirdo neighbors and weirdo things happening around us. We can customize it to our hearts content and hopefully come out with something even better than we started with. OUR home.