The Story of Our Move…{part 1}

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{alternatively titled: Jolanthe had no intention of moving…}

I’ll preface this entire story by saying that Rick is ALWAYS looking at houses. He constantly comes home with the real estate magazines and flips through them or looks on local real estate sites….dreaming, browsing, and trying to get me to bite.

I typically refuse.

As soon as he puts the magazines down long enough, I collect them and put them in the trash can. Because I really didn’t want to move. Not because I was scared, but really…I was happy where we were living. Sure there were things that I would love to do to our house, but it was in a convenient location, we almost had it paid off and packing a family of six could really be a proverbial nightmare ~ to name just a FEW reasons.

The cycle would be that Rick would suggest going to see a house, we might go and look, but …. yeah, we weren’t moving. There was one house that had been a possibility a little bit prior, but the barking dogs were a HUGE deterrent and pretty well settled me back into the “Nope! Not moving!” category.

And there I sat.

At a Christmas party in December, one of our friends mentioned how much they enjoyed the area they had moved to and told us that we should look in the same area. Almost two weeks later, I did a search on the internet, curious ~ just to see. I apparently did something wrong because only three houses popped up in my search, and I’m sure there were more than three available for sale in that area.

The first two houses were ones that definitely wouldn’t work, but one other house popped up in the search and I clicked on it. That one click began a spiral of events that I didn’t see coming, but all in a good way.

Rick was on the phone with our realtor rather quickly and we set up an appointment to see the house the next night, Monday, December 27th. From the moment we turned into the driveway, Rick was pretty much sold on the house.  We walked through and you could almost see the wheels turning in his mind.  Ironically, we found out that the listing on the house had actually expired ~ it had been on the market for over 200 days and there hadn’t been an offer on it.

Tuesday night, he turned to me and said, “So, are you ready to put an offer on the house?” My response was nothing short of encouraging for him to hear {I’m sure} ~ “Are you kidding? We are NOT moving!”

I then proceeded to list the 300 reasons why moving was not an option, why we were staying put in our current house {thank.you.very.much} and life would go on same as always.

Because I’m grown up like that.

Wednesday morning after Rick went to work, I called my mom and asked if she would want to drive out to the house with me so I could look around {ok, snoop} a bit more since it had been dark when we visited the house. I wasn’t planning to let Rick know because I figured it would just fuel the “we are buying this house” fire. The owner of the house was working, so I pulled in the driveway and began showing my mom the backyard area…when the owner pulled in.

Oops.

After I’d introduced myself, my mom managed to corral the kids in the van and I spent the next half hour talking to him and asking him different questions that we’d had about the house. We exchanged numbers and I immediately called Rick to tell him about the meeting.

But still…I just wasn’t convinced we should go any further with it.

New Year’s Eve we received a call from our realtor that another couple working with another agency had put an offer in on the house. But there was a catch. When the seller heard about their offer, he told his realtor that he had met another couple {umm…that would be the nosy me} and if we were interested, he would like to sell the house to us instead.

And that’s when all the fun began….

{to be continued}