Dark side of the moon.

The last couple months have felt like I’ve been on the dark side of the moon.  You know, the place where it tends to be dark, there’s poor to little communicative reception, and you are doing whatever you can running on reserves to best prepare for that sun to come around again.  There have been an insane amount of developments, some meh, most good.  It’s gonna take some time, and I shall attempt to bring you all back up to speed.

We found a house!

We sold our house!

We moved!

We survived!

Back near the beginning of February, last time I posted (yes, it has been forever), we had just entered into contract to sell our house, two days after re-listing on the market.  It was a great house, had been my first home purchase, treated me well for 9 years, and we were thrilled to end up with good buyers, whom should be served well by the house down the road.

I had also mentioned that we finally found another house, but our offer was bested by an all-cash one, and ours was not selected.  A week or two later, the all-cash offer pulled out and we were able to secure contract with ours once again.  Negotiations were somewhat tricky, dealing with 4 sellers (estate sale), but we eventually ended up with mutually agreeable terms, post-inspection repairs were done, and moving dates were set.

On March 30, we somehow (still not sure exactly how) managed to pull off simultaneous closing the sale of our previous house, and closing the purchase of our new house.  We thankfully arranged a free-rent back through Sunday at the previous place which allowed us the weekend to perform a heap of maintenance and cleaning in preparation for the big move day.  Turns out, we could have used a month of transition time.  This house is not so much a fixer-upper as it is a major cleaner-upper as it was built for and occupied by the matriarch (Josephine) of the DeMartini Family Farm, who passed away a couple of years ago.

After passing, the kids sold the farm which has now been turned into a small Renaissance Homes development, with our new lone house remaining perched above the others at one end.  We love the place more everyday and have enjoyed learning more history of the farm from all the friendly neighbors we’ve already met in the pre-existing neighborhood.  Also feeling extremely blessed to have been able to find an accessible house that stands to be our home for the foreseeable future.

Without further ado (I’m rusty with the writing, and might get carried away), I’ll share some pictures of our new homestead and try to briefly caption just a few of the projects we’ve taken on to-date, the dust won’t be settling anytime soon and there will be more project posts coming.

Let the insanity and moving begin, lucked out with great weather for the weekend.

What WAS in the master bathroom.

After some serious destruction, we found tile flooring and a grab bar under there!

We’ll eventually re-do the entire bathroom when we can afford, but are thrilled with how well this cleaned up and it’s completely useable for the interim!

A late night, little sleep idea led to us refinishing the hardwood floor in the kitchen/living room. This is the crazy crew that pulled it off and the results are amazing.

My nerd cave, aka “place of magic” has taken over what use to be the dining room.

What our new dining room currently looks like until we can move into the living room.

View out the front looks over a green space with Kellogg Creek, an estuary for all sorts of birds, and frogs.