Long Time No Blog

I can't believe it has been two and a half months since I have blogged, but that's what it says! Most of you know that we sold our house, bought a new one and spent 5 weeks renovating it before we moved in. Life has been going at warp speed! For those of you that didn't know that, i'll give you a little background information. We had been living in a little 1200 square foot house for over a year that we bought to keep as a rental. The market in starter homes went up so much here that we decided to sell it to help us get into a bigger house more quickly. We searched for several months for a new home to fit our needs but had a hard time finding anything. We wanted over an acre with a 2400 square foot home that was either a rambler or a tri-level. We finally found one that we couldn't afford, but it had been on the market for almost a year, so we gave them a VERY low offer. They were slow in responding because they were hoping another offer would come in, and it did in the 11th hour. We got to looking again and decided to put an offer on a house that was a short sale (the owners owed the bank more than the house is worth.) It is a 6 bedroom 3 1/2 bathroom, 3200 square foot rambler (yay, no stairs!) on .68 of an acre. We knew this would be a long process, but we were in no hurry and weren't going to put our house on the market until we went into escrow on the new one (houses on our street were getting contracts within a week so we didn't want it to sell until we were ready).

It was really hard to go for several months without getting "attached" to the house because there were no guarantees that the house was ours. We didn't do much planning or anything. The house became a short sale because the owners took out a bunch of money on the house to renovate it. Unfortunately, the hubby didn't do a very good job and the house was quite a mess.

As far as short sales go, ours was pretty quick. We went under contract in mid-October and got the keys the very end of December. Jeromy took 2 weeks off of work and, with the help of some wonderful people from church, dedicated himself to some sweat equity. The house had a gutted hall bathroom when we bought it, so our plan was to re-texture and paint the interior, tile the entry and kitchen, re-carpet the bedrooms and put in the new hall bathroom. What we ended up doing is a whole other story. I don't know how many times we said, "Well, a is already ripped out, so we might as well replace b as well." The process of scraping all the walls, retexturing, and painting the house took my dad (he's a painting contractor) and a boy from church we hired, 3 weeks. We ended up replacing all the flooring in the house, re-doing the 1/2 bathroom, buying new appliances, putting in all new baseboards, replaced all the doors with trim, garage door openers, recessed lighting in 4 rooms, some window coverings, fixed the leaky roof etc. etc. etc. We basically did everything but a few things we have to save up for next. We still want to replace a few old windows, redo the master bathroom, and paint the exterior. All of the trim work and doors need to have the nail holes filled, be caulked and painted, but that has to wait until we go out of town. Our kitchen island is going from brown to black too, but oil based paint is stinky!

It is amazing how much the house has changed in such a short time. I plan on posting some before and after pictures, so check back soon.