I Am Overwhelmed. And our house.

This summer has been crazy. I don't even remember everything that has been going on. It's just been insane. I'll try and remember, and I'll try and get caught up here in the next few days. I'll do some highlights, but they won't be in any particular order, because I really have no clue what happened at what times. I'll start with the biggest one.

At some point, we decided to buy a house.

Let me fix that statement: Charlie decided to buy a house, and I agreed. He started thinking one day how much we have wasted in rent throughout the years, and it didn't sit well with him. So we started looking around. The house we were renting was actually for sale, but when we started considering buying it, everything in the house started malfunctioning. The tub (that had been "fixed" a couple times already while we were there) started leaking again. Sink valves broke and moisturized the boys' room. Lights that I had changed only a few weeks earlier burned out yet again. Broken sprinkler system. I think that's around the time that the garage door broke.Rain storms that made our child cry in terror (no, I'm not blaming the house for the rain storms, but the rain hitting the metal roof was SO loud that about the only place to escape it was in the storage room, and we really didn't want to spend time down there. That's where the spiders had made their homes). Oh, and spiders everywhere. And people issues associated with the house.

So we started looking elsewhere. I wanted to stay in our ward, because our ward is awesome and I didn't want to chance getting a different calling. That narrowed our options down quite a bit. Then we found a good house. We looked into it and decided this would be a great house for us. So Charlie went to the banks to find out what we could get for a loan. As it turns out, the banks wouldn't give him a loan because he hadn't been working at his job long enough for them to be comfortable loaning us money. We were resigned to the fact that we would just have to keep renting for a while. Then one of the banks called. The guy had found a program that would give us a loan. We negotiated with the homeowners and came to an agreement, and not a moment too soon. The next day, someone else made an offer on the house. Whew!

We started the loan process, which turned out to be a nightmare. Every week, we needed more of the same stack of paperwork over and over again. And it seemed we were always made aware of it on Friday mornings and we had to have it in by the weekend. I quit packing at some point because I was starting to become skeptical that the process would ever end.

Finally, 2 or 3 weeks after or agreed-upon closing date, we were able to get our loan approved and finish the buying process. We went over to the bank to sign papers. 2 hours later, we finally finished signing everything. We were told we set a record. The sellers later texted Charlie to tell him that they had just signed their papers for their new house and were done in 15 minutes.

It took us a while to get moved out of the rental and into our new house. With it being such a crazy summer, it was hard to find time to get everything packed up. We finally decided on a day and made it a goal to be moved out by then. We almost made it, but not quite. We picked a bad day to move because there was apparently some scout camp or something going on that weekend, so we didn't have much help. We were able to get all the big stuff and most of the little stuff.

We sacrificed some of the bonuses of living where we were, but we gained a lot more.

Here's our house. Notice the chimney. Sam is very excited to be living in a house with a chimney.

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Downside: Our bedroom is a lot smaller, probably close to half. It's really crowded right now because there are boxes all over, but I think once we get everything situated, it will work just fine.

 I'm not sure whether the closet is an upgrade or a downgrade. It's a lot smaller than our previous one, but at least it's not in a bathroom. And we don't really need more than this.

Upside: The boys have separate rooms. We could have given them separate rooms in the other house, but the layout just didn't work very well for it. All our bedrooms are next to each other, so no one has to be by themselves. And now Sam can play with his toys while Brett is napping because they're no longer in the room with Brett.
This is the room that Sam decided was his. He said it should be his because it has lots of shelves in the closet so he can keep his games in there and Brett can't get them.

Brett's room I think is smaller and doesn't have a great closet, but it will work great.

We no longer have a master bathroom, just an upstairs bathroom and a downstairs bathroom. But that's not so different than what we already had. The rental had 3 bathrooms, but we had to completely close one off because of plumbing issues. And this one is pretty! :)

We don't have a jacuzzi tub anymore, but we do have a nice, long, deep tub. And it doesn't leak.

I realized I never did a post about the rental, so I'll show you some pictures of what we're leaving. I will definitely miss the kitchen. I was huge and had great cabinets.

 Roll-out shelves in all the lower cabinets.

Here's our new kitchen. It's much smaller, but it will work just fine because of one thing.

 A pantry in the kitchen.

This will make up for all the lost cupboard space. Plus, I no longer have to venture down into the storage room to get food.

Another thing that I love is the floors. You can see them in the pictures above. Down below is a picture of the floors in the rental. They look great. If you can keep them clean. And there is no way to keep them clean. When we first moved in, I would sweep them about 6 times a day trying to keep them looking nice. After a while, it just wasn't worth the effort. You could see every speck of dirt. 

The floors we have now aren't near as dark or as glossy, so they stay looking nice longer. I mean, it's hard to keep them clean with a toddler who is learning to self-feed, but it still looks better than the old ones. Plus, if they get scratched, we can just take a sharpie marker and color the scratch (we have yet to test that theory, but that's what we were told).

 We now have a proper dining room. It's just a bit too small for our table, but we'll make it work.

And a living room. With no TV and no toys, so it will stay clean longer than 2 seconds.

Sam is excited to try out our fire place. He has been asking all month if we can start a fire. It shouldn't be long now.

 We have a great family room downstairs. It's been great having a large enough place that everyone can sit and play all at the same time and not feel crowded. There was a room downstairs in the rental, but we used it as a storage room because it was all tiled (really cold on your feet and not great to play on) and it was always much colder than the rest of the house, so we couldn't go down there in the winter. And the spiders took over.

My new craft room is right off the family room. And it's bigger than my old one. Plus it's got an under-the-stairs closet for storage. The only downside is that the lighting is not great for a craft room. I may have to figure something else out for that.

The downstairs bathroom is the only room that hasn't been redone in recent years. And hopefully sometime while we're here we'll be able to redo it.

 It has a great walk-in shower.

One of the things that this house has that the other house lacked is tons of storage.

This storage room is right at the bottom of the stairs. This is where we'll put the rest of our food. It's not as convenient as our other set-up (there was a side entrance in the alley that opened right up to the storage room so we could just throw all our stuff right down there after a shopping trip), but it will still be great.

The left side is for all the food. I already took down all the shelves that were in here before I remembered I hadn't taken any pictures. The right side is a wood room. Basically, we can throw all our wood in through the window and have it stored there so we don't have to go outside in the winter to get firewood each day.

This is another storage room downstairs on the other side of the house.

 It runs the width of the whole house.

 Plus there closets all around the house.

Another place that could use some work is the garage.

But this makes it all worth it. We have a massive back yard. And the previous homeowner left us some toys, which the boys have loved. I love that there is so much room. We have the trampoline, a small slide, and a couple other things, and there is still TONS of room to run around. Plus it's got some great shade trees.

We have a very large garden plot.

Sam has loved having his very own swing set.

 And we have a decent patio right off the dining room.

We're very excited to finally have our own house. Now if I could only find the box with all our bookshelf hardware so I could actually unpack everything...