Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Time for a change (Be warned…long detailed post!)

So after I found out we would be expecting our 5th child this year, I had such a strong feeling that it was time for us to move.  I wanted to move about every 6 months because we had outgrown our West Jordan house about 3 years ago, but it never felt right and I knew it wasn’t time for us to move for whatever reason. So this past year I had gone around the house fixing small things that had been bugging me about the house and might turn away buyers. We painted the whole house, fixed all the holes that David had made throughout the years to add wiring to the house, fixed the ceilings, de-cluttered, and a few other things.  So after I found out I was pregnant my sister also told me they were moving and had found a house and that really got me having the itch to move.  I went to David and told him I thought we should sell our house and start looking for a new house and he said no at first until he went and actually prayed about it and thought about it. After that he too knew it was the right thing to do. He had just been released from his calling as Elders Quorum President after 4 years of serving and didn’t feel like anything was holding us there anymore. David had a friend who had sold his home a few years back through a company that you pay a flat fee for them to do all the legal stuff, but we would have to set up all the showings and everything else that went with it. So we gave that a try. We had so many realtors come and tell us we would never sell it without a real realtor helping sell our house and that they could get us more money. David would ask every single one of them if he would still be able to walk away with as much money as we would doing it ourselves and not having to pay them the 3%. None of them would agree to that. Poor guy probably talked to at least 10 realtors a day for a full month.  Meanwhile, we had told David’s parents that if they came out to visit in March that we would go and look at houses with them while they were here.  We also had Grandparents day at the kid’s school that we talked them into coming out for. So we set out to go look at 4 houses.  We weren’t really looking to buy at the time, but just wanted to see what was out there. Our original plan was to buy sometime in July, when he had more time to save money.  The first house we looked at was the house we would end up buying.  It’s in Herriman and we loved it! I had been eyeing it on zillow for a while mostly because it had 8 bedrooms and the price was amazing for the size. David was not excited about looking at this house at all and thought it would be a waist, but we came and looked and loved it.  It had everything we had said we would want in a house and it was huge! We just kept finding more rooms and closets and fun little features. The backyard was amazing too. It’s 1/2 an acre and has a really neat playhouse for the kids. We just kept saying how much we loved this house and the realtor told us to slow down because we still had a few more houses to look at, so we went and looked at a couple more houses. None of them compared to the first house.  The kitchen was weird or tiny or the master bedroom was way too small or the backyard wasn’t actually a backyard, but 3 separate steep levels of rocks.  Again this was back in March and we didn’t feel like we had enough money to have the down payment and pay for all the moving costs, so we told the realtor that we were going to wait and put off buying until we felt we had enough money. Well after a few days we just still couldn’t forget about that house and how amazing it would be for our family, so we decided to go and look at it again and a few other houses in the area. Side note…we switched realtors. We had gone to look at one house in Pleasant Grove a few weeks before the Herriman house and really liked Spencer the realtor, but then our loan officer gave us a referral for this other realtor, so that’s who we went to look at a few houses with.  So in the end we went with the first realtor, Spencer and absolutely loved him! Anyways, after looking at the house a second time we knew it was the house for us. The day after we made an offer for asking price and it was accepted.  We were sick…we still hadn’t sold our house and had no idea when or if it would sell and what the heck had we just done making an offer on a house with all these things still up in the air??? When we told all of our friends and family that we were buying a new house and we would be moving in 8 weeks later, they were all very concerned for us. I was freaking out one night and so I went to the temple to see if we were crazy or if this really was the road we were supposed to take.  I came home and David was anxiously waiting for my answer. I told him that I got a very strong and clear answer that our house would sell and we would have the money for all that we needed. I felt so much peace after that. David felt peace as well,  but he kept saying, I just don’t know how it can all work out. He had countless spreadsheets of exactly how much we had to sell our house for to get the money we needed for down payment and all the other expenses…by the end of April I wanted to throw his laptop off a building and never see a spreadsheet again with those numbers on it!!!! So about a week and a half after we had put our house on the market and made an offer on the new house, we got an offer for full asking price!!!! We were so relieved. They said they wanted to close at the end of April and that we could rent from them for the remainder of the time.  We then moved up our closing date for our new house from May 18th to May 6th.  We were able to have plenty of money after our profit from our house to help with the down payment and get all the things we would need for our new house.  So many amazing miracles and blessings that came together for our benefit.  Don’t get me wrong there were quite a few bumps in the road. The loan didn’t go smoothly and we kept getting figures that were wrong as to how much we would need for down payment and a few other things like that, but on May 6th we finally got to go sign all the papers and make the house officially ours.  We didn’t get the keys right away though, because there were some issues with the sellers and they hadn’t signed a form right or something and so we just kept waiting and then around 5:00 that night we finally got the keys to our house!!!!!

The week of the move was hectic as would be expected. I was 3 months pregnant and just getting over my sickness and exhaustion. And to top it off we could not get in touch with the moving company we had booked about a month prior to our move and put down a down payment for…Beehive Movers is who we were trying to use. I had done so much research and read all their reviews after our last moving fiasco 6 years prior. I was so confident with them and then the week of we tried calling, emailing, facebooking, pretty much everything we could think of to get a hold of them and finalize details for our move on Friday. I probably called them at least 40 times. Not even joking. I left messages and never got a response.  It was terrible.  So finally the day before we were supposed to move and we still hadn’t heard from them I called and left many messages informing them that we would be going with a different moving company and that I better get my deposit back from them or I would call the better business bureau, if I didn’t have my money back into my account.  It was CRAZY!!!! So we never did hear from them, but they did deposit my money back in my account.  Luckily David found a different moving company 2 days before our move and got them set. They were amazing!!! It was 4 college guys. They showed up on time, were happy, helpful and did an amazing job in a fast time! They are called Big Boy Movers. The price was unbelievably fair too! They started at about 9:00 a.m. and were done loading and unloading a little after noon.  We would highly recommend them to anyone who is moving.

So after 6 weeks of packing and organizing we were so glad to be done with the whole moving process. I HATE MOVING!!!! I was lucky that I didn’t have to deal with all the loan stuff and realtors like David did, but I did have to pack our whole house while pregnant! Smile  We were so grateful to have great friends and family to help us with so many things that come with moving. The day before the movers came we went ahead and took a load or two over to the new house with stuff that we didn’t want the movers to have to deal with. David’s tools and all the awkward shaped things or breakable things.  Luckily David is a stickler for being very organized for moving and had all boxes ready for the movers and everything labeled for which floor they would be on and in which room they belonged.  Friday afternoon, Trish helped with the unpacking and with Parker and Lizzy at the new house, while David and I went to the old house to clean it and get it ready for the new owners.

The crazy thing is that although I know our old house was a great house and really did serve it’s purpose for 6 years, I was not sad to leave it. It had served its purpose and we were definitely sad to leave the people and friends we had made, but I had no idea how confined I was in that house. The kitchen only had 3 cabinets and the 3 drawers and I am a huge fan of the kitchen, so it was always so hard to be in there. I still don’t know how I fit all of our stuff in that house. We were seriously busting out of the seams of it.  But we had amazing memories in it and always seemed to fit a ton of people in it somehow.  So here are some pictures of our old house on Skyvue Circle.

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Here are the pictures I took of the house the first time we saw it.

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We weren’t fans of the chandelier or the drapery in house and I can’t wait to get to painting next year, when I’m not pregnant.

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The sellers had been trying to sell their house for about a year and just had no luck, so they decided to rent it out. The renters had been living here for about 6 months and hadn’t touched the yard, so when we got there it was so overgrown. I spent a full 3 days just pulling the weeds from the flower beds and getting it to not look like the worst house on the block.  The backyard was about up to our calves and was horrible to mow.  David’s parents gave us a housewarming gift and so that went to helping buy our new riding lawn mower, refrigerator and dishwasher.  For a half acre there was no way we were doing a push mower! The sellers took their fridge with them and the dishwasher was horrible!! The renters told us that they had never used it because it was so gross and just hand washed everything! We got the fridge the day we moved in, but the dishwasher was out of stock until the Tuesday after we moved in.  It had been raining a ton the weeks leading up to the move and then for the first week after we moved in. The first lawn mower we bought also was broken. Sad smile  We had Lowe’s come over and it turned out they sold us a dud.  So they gave us a new one and it has been amazing. It finally stopped raining long enough for me to mow the week after we had moved in. I love my new mower!!! The neighbors all seemed grateful for the progress we made to the front yard.

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The front yard flower bed before and after. It was so much work!!!

We also found that we have a new pet…deer. They jump the fence in our backyard and eat all the fruit trees and if we gardened they would eat all those as well.

20150506_145015 This is what I found the first day we came to the house. I thought it was a statue because it just stayed there and had no fear of me no matter how close I got. Biscuit is luckily able to scare them away though.  I’m not a fan of the “presents” they leave behind in our yard…”country” living in Utah!

It’s been a few months now that we have been in our new house and everyday I still wake up like I’m in a dream and can’t believe this is our house. No buyer’s remorse at all! We have had several guests and big get togethers and they are so much more pleasant than in our old house.  We feel so blessed to have this house!

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