Home Sweet Home

Well, its official. Matt and I have lived in our new house for a year now! Crazy how fast the year has flew by! I think Crystal and my sister are the only bloggers that know the story of our house we are in now so here goes!
Matt and I really weren't in the market to buy a new house. I like to go to the N. KY listings website (still do) and every so often I just like to see what's out there. Well, our old house was very nice, I loved it, we built it, it was our first home, we picked out everything in it. I was never happy with the neighborhood. I will sound like a mean old lady when I say this, but there were so many kids in the neighborhood. That is not the bad part, the fact they would ride there bikes in the middle of the street and your trying to get to your house and they won't get out of the way and get on the sidewalk would annoy the heck out of me. It was EVERY SINGLE DAY in the summer. 4th of July was horrible too, people (a.k.a. rednecks) would light off there firecrackers in the middle of road and you couldn't drive down the street without being scared of your car blowing up! It was literally like driving thru a warzone (I've never been in a war zone, but that is what it felt like) So, last summer shortly after I found out I was prego I was looking at the listings. I found a really cute ranch (that is what we wanted to build for our first home, but couldn't afford one so we built a bi level) the basement was finished, and it looked so nice o the internet and the price was right too! So I called a friend of the family (Amy Barkett) who is a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker. She showed us the ranch. OH MY GOSH! It needed A LOT of work. It was all cosmetic things that needed done, but the house was a mess inside. It had stains all over the carpet, the paint was hideous, the kitchen sink looked like the previous owners had cooked something in it because it was all black. However, with my dad being the handy man he is we thought with his help we could fix the house up really nice. We were going to put a bid in and Amy suggested we lowball since the house needed so much fixin' up. Come to find out there were 3 other bids on the house, but were bidding $20-30 thousand MORE than the listed price!!!! So we said noway jose and didn't bid. A little later on we found out the house was a foreclosed home thats why the listed price was so good. Makes sense. Well, by this point Matt and I had the bug (kinda like when you want a new car) So, the next day I called my sister and asked her to ask Gary (my brother in law) where they were building there houses. The company he works for built our first house, so we thought maybe we could look into building again. Gary said there was a house, already built, ready to move in in Independence if we wanted to look at it. He told us the house was appraised at $210,000 and that is typically the asking price for a house our type ranch. However, with the housing market the way it is Mark (the owner of Trademark Properties) was wanting to sell the house and the house is on a flag lot so Mark lowered the price to $160,000! We thought it was too good to be true. The next day Matt left for work a little earlier than usual so he could come look at the house. (We literally live off the same road Fidelity is on!) Matt only got to see the outside of the house, but loved it. He called me (I had an appointment to see the inside of the house that afternoon) and told me if I liked the inside of the house he wanted it.

So, I was 9 weeks prego and had a doctor appointment that morning. I heard Olivia's heartbeat for the first time that day so I knew it was going to be a good day :) My dad came with me to check out the house and I loved it. Apparently there was another couple looking at the house, but didn't make an offer. I told Mark we would sign a contract that day! So, that night Mark Perkins (he is the real estate person for Trademark Properties) came to our house, he forgot the paperwork, but basically took our word that we would buy the house. He said he would put a sold sign out the next day so no one could look at it. This was July 16th and we moved in August 19th.
We got our old house on the market and had a couple of showings the first week it was on the market. It was very stressful to still live in the house, have to keep it spotless "just in case" someone wanted to look at it. Most of the time when an agent wanted to show the house I would get a phone call an hour or two beforehand. One day I was running late for work because I was having morning sickness that I forgot to make the bed and clean up the bathroom. Wouldn't you know it, I got a call that someone wanted to see the house that afternoon! Luckily I was in KY that morning so I ran home at lunch, cleaned the house up and went back to work. We kept Huckleberry at my parents house that entire month until we moved into our new house.
When we moved into our new house Matt's mom, his brother, my parents, Amy and Gary all helped us move. We rented a U Haul and only had to make 1 big trip! We did leave some smaller things at the old house and Matt and I went over every few days to get things and check on the house. I will never forget after we moved in, I got really sick (morning sickness again) that I didn't go to work. I remember folding towels and putting things away and just started crying. I was emotional from pregnancy and missed our old house so badly! I thought to myself what have we done! I loved our old house!!! I got over it pretty quickly and now LOVE our house.
So, we thought for sure we would sell our old house rather quickly since it was only 4 years old, and I hate to brag, but it is the nicest house in the neighborhood! We would have several showings just about every week. We had a total of 33 showings and only 1 offer. It was AWFUL! We had a few months of double mortgages, but Matt's mom helped us out tremendously. We finally did sell our old house in November. What a fiasco that was too! First the owners wanted to wait until January to close then it changed to mid December then all of a sudden they couldn't close fast enough. We literally got a phone call on a Monday and closed on that Friday. What hurt us was we took out a home equity loan on our old house to put down on our new house and didn't realize we had to pay that off BEFORE we could close on our old house. We lowered the listing price on our house a couple of times and wound up having to bring $12,000 to closing. We lost money big time on selling our house, but that is the housing market. Its definitely a buyers market. We just wanted to get rid of the house, we had a baby on the way and it was getting too close to my due date! We are just thankful we sold it when we did!!!
So there you have it! Were now still working on getting things the way we want them, but I think that will be a everlasting thing!!