Friday, August 9, 2013

It's been a long time... once again

So I have no idea where the last seven months have gone.  But I can tell you it's been nutty around here.  We have spent the last four months moving.  It didn't really take us four months to move, but the whole process has been 4 months.  And five months ago, if you had told me we were moving soon, I would have told you you were crazy.

For several years we have wanted to move to a house with more land... a couple of acres.  We didn't really know what that looked like... out in the country, more land in the suburbs... we really weren't sure.  Every once in a while, I casually look online at real estate with acreage.  Well, in March I was looking and found something close by we could afford.  By the time I contacted our real estate agent to look at it, it was under contract.  But that kinda' got us started looking more seriously.  I have had friends that have taken up to 2 years to find their ideal acreage property, so I thought it would take some time.  Well, in two weeks we found the perfect place.  See, several months, or even a year or more ago we made a list.    It was a list of all things we wanted our acreage to be or to have in order for us to move there.  And we also made the "it would also be nice if it had..." list.  The house and property completely fulfilled the "must have" list and partially fulfilled the "it would be nice" list.  So we made an offer and it was accepted.

Oh, yea, we need to sell our house.  So we spent two weeks getting it ready to go on the market.  We packed stuff up, cleaned things up, painted, etc.  I would say we never would have been able to get it all done without the help of the young adult ministry from our church.  Several men and women came over on multiple Saturdays to help us get our previous house ready for the market and get our new house ready for us to move in.  We finally got that on the market and it is currently under contract.  We are impatiently waiting for it to close, but that is soon.  It took about 6 weeks for our house to sell.  Longer than we would have liked, but we are happy it sold.  We got the contract a few days before we moved out.  We have been at the new property about 7 weeks.

Oh, I guess I should tell you about the new property... the house, although a little bit smaller than our old one is pretty amazing.  The previous owner spent a lot of money remodeling and upgrading things.  The kitchen is gorgeous and the kitchen/dining/living room area is perfect for entertaining.  We've already had a 30+ people homeschool get together here.  The space we lost was mostly lost storage space.  But that's ok.  It forced me to clean things out and purge.  I got rid of 3 car loads before we moved and 17 boxes of stuff since we moved.  The cars don't fit in the garage yet, but they will soon (as soon as we build a shed).  It has 2.5 acres.  There are some trees, but it is mostly open space.  We have already planted eight fruit trees (4 apple, 2 peach, and 2 pear) and taken out 4 junk trees.  People always ask if we are getting chickens.  I don't know.  We haven't ruled it out, but we just need to see.  We are now out in the country... it is definitely rural, even though we are only 30 minutes from downtown and 20 minutes from the mall and Whole Foods.  We have found folks out in the country to be a lot different than the suburbs.  We'll just leave that at that.

So future posts... if I remember I have a blog and post, might still be about craft projects.  I am sad to have left my magnetic chalk board wall and my board and batten wall at the other house.  Saying that, though, I am not sure I will be replicating them here.   We will still homeschool, some posts might be about that.  I am still into digital scrapbooking... in fact I am starting a new class at Jessica Sprague dot com next week and I am looking forward to it.  I also might post about gardening as we've started with the fruit trees and I will continue with some raised beds next year.

I am fairly certain that I will probably be as erratic at posting as I have been.  :)