House Hunting

For those who haven't yet heard, we are moving back to Texas in three weeks!

We received an offer in mid-January from the team I worked on in San Antonio to come back.  We thought it was something we had some time to consider, but came to found out that the wanted me back immediately.  We had a few very concentrated days of thinking, praying, and decision making!  We decided that this is a good opportunity for us and agreed to take it. 

The job is in Dallas now, so at the end of February we'll once again to loading up and moving on!  This will be our 4th move in 2 1/2 years.  But this time, it's permanent enough that we're buying a house!

Once we made our decision, we planned a quick house hunting trip to see what we could find.  We desperately wanted to move back to the same ward that we lived in Richardson so we started searching online and engaged the help of a realtor from that ward.  A foolproof plan, right?

Wrong.  We couldn't find anything in the ward!  We found pictures of one online that looked perfect for us.  But the realtor went to take a look at it for us and....it was not desirable.  :(  Boo!  Then we found one we LOVED!  And, you guessed it, after being on the market for 200+ days, it went under contract the afternoon before we arrived in Texas and could go see it.  How did we find out?  By the home inspector that was in the house when we showed up for our showing!  Double boo!

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.  We went down to Texas on Wednesday, 1/25, and our trip didn't get off to the best start.  Eve did ok on the plane, but things just went downhill from there.  We got in around 11pm that night and went to pick up our rental car.  An hour later....!  They only had ONE size of car seat and it was way too small for Eve.  And it took 45 minutes to get it installed in the car.  Eve's knees were in her chest every time she was in the seat.  Poor girl. 

So we finally got over to our hotel after midnight only to find that the crib we had called ahead for was NOT in the room and, sorry, but housekeeping was gone for the day and no one could get us a crib.  Are you kidding me?!  So Eve and I slept in one bed and Andrew in the other.  It was not a restful night...both Eve and I tend to move around a lot.

We were scheduled to meet our realtor early the next morning, so we were up bright and early.  That was the discouraging morning when we realized that all the houses we had picked out online as our top 3 - 4 would not work for us.  And our favorite had been taken the day before.  We ended our search early that day.  In poor spirits.

We headed up to stay with my Grandma for the remaining 3 days we had there. 

It was so nice of them to put us up!

And Eve enjoyed playing with some new toys!

That night we knew we had to do some serious re-evaluating of our plans.  We only had a few homes left on our list to see on Friday - and none of them we'd ever really been very intersted in.  Do we decided it was time to expand our search to Garland, even though it wasn't in the ward we wanted. 

We came up with about 12 more houses that fit every criteria we had, just weren't in the ward, and sent them to the realtor to schedule showings.  We had a busy Friday!  By the end of the day, we had really only one house that we both liked and it was decision time.  Did we like it enough to give up living in the ward with all our friends?  It may sound silly, but it was not an easy decision - that's how much we wanted to go back to that ward!

But at the end of the day, we both felt good about it:

The ward meets in the same builing as our ward, so we attended there in the morning on Sunday and decided that this is the place for us right now, even if it's not what we originally wanted.  I guess Heavenly Father has other plans for us!

We came home on Sunday night and made an offer on the house on Monday.  We negotiated back and forth a couple of time with the sellers, finally landed on a price, and are now moving forward in the process, set to close and move in on February 28th!  I start work in Dallas on March 1st.

Crazy...

Side note: it wasn't all work and no play on our house hunting trip :)  We had a blast with Grandma and Grandpa Bradley!  Eve got to eat more french fries when we went out one night for dinner at Braums...yum!   

I took more pictures of the house, but wasn't sure about posting too many before we actually close.  More to come!