I went on a girls trip in July and my friends asked about my blogging (or more, lack thereof). With the sweetest of compliments and pushing, they encouraged me to get back to blogging. They told me that I had stories to tell and wanted me to blog more. Apparently I'm not the only crazy mom trying to find her place in the world, and my sometimes funny, sometimes sad stories about our nutty life were readable to them? Or maybe I just have really good friends.
I'm going to give it a really solid effort. I have life kind of handled right now (cue major catostrophe) and it feels like a perfect time to fire up the old typing fingers and get going.
I will start with where my family is now. A year or so ago, I wrote this post about our sudden move to Fayetteville from outside of Little Rock. And by sudden, I've blogged about the fact that that move was 8 years or so in the making, but the actual move took no less than 3 weeks.
When we moved here, we had not sold our house yet. We knew it would take mere minutes to sell it, so we found an apartment that only had a 9 month lease. We had visions of selling our house immediately and banking the money we used to spend on mortgage while we ONLY paid for an apartment. We were wrong. It took 11 months to sell our house. Eleven months of a mortgage and rent. Two months past the time our lease was up. In the end, we had dropped the price $10,000 and ended up accepting an offer even lower than that. But, we had paid a mortgage and rent for 11 months and we were D-O-N-E. It was sad times. But happy times all the same. THE HOUSE WAS SOLD!!!!
Bye Bye East End/Hensley House you were good to us.
At the same time that we heard wind that there was a possible buyer for our house in Little Rock, we started looking here in Fayetteville. We had driven around a lot and gotten a lay of the town. We knew for sure we didn't want to live in a town outside of Fayetteville. We'd had 10 years of the suburbs and our 11 months in the apartment might not have been ideal, but one thing that apartment had going for it was PRIMO LOCATION TO ALL THINGS FUN. Seriously, you could get in the van and go to Walmart, the gym, the gas station, pick up the dry cleaning, go to the liquor store, the hardware store and the bank, and then bring home either BBQ or Mexican for dinner and have only put 1.5 miles on your odometer. To say we'd gotten spoiled to being right in the thick of things was an understatement. Rob's 40 mile each way commute from Little Rock had turned into a 10 minute trip and that included dropping kids off at school, I don't lie. I used to have to go 20 minutes to drop kids off at pre-k and then 30 minutes in the opposite direction back to town to go to work. And on my off days, the zoo, museums, splash pads and all our playgroup friends were miles and miles away. My job is now 5 minutes from the house. Playdate fun is less than 10 minutes away in any direction.
The one problem with the area our apartment was in was that the actual houses were very pricey. One day, we received an email from a realtor saying, "here is a house in your area and price range. This one will go fast." Rob looked at it on his lunch break immediately and only felt okay about it. His description and pictures didn't make me want to see it. I'd almost put it out of my brain but something just made me say "see it yourself, and then you'll be able to stop thinking about it." And I saw it and I wanted to put an offer down immediately. I saw so many possibilities. I saw it the way the home owners had decorated it, and I thought about what we could do to make it more 'us'. The pictures hadn't done it justice. The "small closet" was 3 times the size of mine in my old house. The smallish kid's room wasn't so small once you were in it and realized there was a ton of furniture taking up a ton of space. Let me also mention that our favorite park is LESS than 1/4 mile from our front door. There is even a little walking trail from our neighborhood into the park. I saw its charm, its GIANT deck, its proximity to all things important (like Walmart, lezbehonest), and I wanted it yesterday.
We put in an offer May 31. It was accepted June 1. Our house outside of Little Rock put in an offer June 5 that we accepted June 7. Our house here closed July 10. Our house in East End closed July 25. We lived out of boxes for 11 days at the beginning of July, our new house was supposed to close July 1 and it too 11 extra days. I took a long ago planned girls trip and left the kids with Rob for three days in the middle of all this. I took the kids to Kansas City with no Rob to attend the wedding of my cousin while Rob hired movers and moved us in the house when we FINALLY finalized the house. At the end of July, I once again packed up me and the kids and we went to my parents house for an end of the summer getaway I had promised them. In the middle of all this I started taking call at the job I got in January, so some nights I was at the hospital at all hours. Life as we knew it has been so nuts lately.
And oh, so awesome. Like really awesome. We really live in this town. Not renting. Not still owning a home in another town. For reals, we own a piece of this town that we have wanted to live in for years. We both have jobs that we (usually) love, Rylan is in a school he loves, Max MOSTLY likes his pre-k and we live so close to tons of family. The new house is not just bigger than our old one, it makes better use of space. Open floor plans are awesome in their own way, but I like the older floor plans where a kitchen is a kitchen and a den is a den. This new house has something our old house was lacking: closet space. Rob and I have a walk in, there is a double doored closet in hallway that is huge, a linen closet and then another closet in the hall that has a secondary closet in it, meant for guns. We don't really know what to do with that closet, so we just keep our vacuum and medicines in there. That's normal, yes?
I cannot wait to do updates on how we are changing things. The house had amazing bones and had been kept up with well. But, it was built in the 1970's and was owned previously by the Methodist Church down the road and used as their pastor's house. So, we've got some painting and buffing and wall hanging and nailing and ship shaping to do.
I will be back with pics of the new place. SOON!
