House Hunt = Over

For the past few weeks it was particularly difficult to convince Pearl to take her morning nap, so I often resorted to driving her around until she drifted off. I couldn't help but feel that things had come full circle, having heard my own mother talk about having to drive me to sleep when I was a baby. Perhaps that's why I enjoy going for drives now and why I don't really mind doing it for Pearl; it's a quiet time with nothing pressing on me and plenty of space for my mind to wander.

Sometimes we'd leave town and venture out onto county roads, paved and dirt alike. I liked those drives best because I love to see the woods and the hills. Other times we'd stay in town and I'd kill two birds with one stone; keep my eyes on the houses we passed, searching for the perfect one with the 'for rent' sign staked in the yard.

After finding not much of anything and not being able to afford what I did find I finally wised up and started looking on the south (read: poor) side of town. And last week I found a house! Barely inside town in a pretty quiet area. The poor side of town, yes, but in a pretty nice neighborhood all the same. It's location is the only reason we can afford such a big, nice house.

I'll leave out the boring phone tag part and I'm definitely not going to write about how I agreed to leave the door unlocked and come back and show my husband later, then promptly locked the door behind me causing my husband to have to shimmy in through a window. How embarrassing. I'll skip all that and chatter on about the house itself.

It has a carport big enough to hold both the car and the motorcycle. A big backyard, fenced in. Tall trees in front. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a roomy kitchen and dining room, and a utility room where we can have a washer and dryer - a washer and dryer in the house, such a luxury! It feels so good to know our days of trekking across the parking lot to do coin laundry are numbered.

The kitchen has this atrocious orange-red formica on the counters - very dated, but in good condition, and at least it has a lot of counter space - our current kitchen is about the size of our walk-in closet and I chop things up on the stove, which has on at least one occasion led to a burnt cutting board. And the cabiniets! A thousand cabinets! I don't know what we'll put in them all! How strange it will be, to not have stuff fall out on our heads when we dig around for the ziplock bags!

The two small bedrooms share a closet and that closet might just have been what sold me on the place because I immediately had such sweet visions of kids playing tunnel between the rooms. :)

Teri wrote up some very apt thoughts on finding the right home and I wanted to share them as they echo so well what I feel about houses. We went ahead and put a deposit down on this house today... with a little trepidation as it is at the very tippity top of our budget... but I knew I wanted to lease it, because it just feels good, feels like a good home for us, at least until such a time as we can buy our own house.

Our current landlord was very accommodating and agreed to let us out of our lease two months early, so we will be moving at the end of this month!