It only took 26 months......

I started this blog back in May 2013.  In my first entry, I wrote "The journey is likely to be very painful, but hopefully will be worth it in the end.."

We never knew it would be quite as painful as it turned out to be.  I have lost count of the number of houses that we thought would be our number five.  Now we are in our number five, I'm closing this blog and all future house-related posts will be on my regular mchowat.blogspot.com

Our first visit to the new house

Ben and I took a look around our new house as soon as we could get in there!!!  This is his bedroom

These closets will be gone ASAP

Walking around in Maggie's room

Maggie's room is so small you can't open the closet door fully with furniture in there!!!!

One of the closets at the top of the stairs

Closet next to laundry

Closet in our bedroom

bathroom

Goofy Ben at bottom of stairs

Dining room

Family room (soon to be dining room)

Ben's fishy room-look at where the TV was!!!!

Skylights in back room

half bath (scary)

kitchen

hydrangeas with limited life span

magnolia that will have to go

One step forward, two steps back.....

Sometimes I feel like this will NEVER end!!!!  Sam met with Rochelle (our designer) on Wednesday and we finally got some numbers from them-$8000 to do what we expected to be $2500!!!  This caused us to take a HUGE step back.  I have had major reservations about this group since we started to pin them down to what we wanted done.  Our worst suspicions and fears have been founded.  We are not going to work with this group after all.  It means we won't be getting any/much work done on the house before we move in, but that is OK.  This sets us back with our plans, but will be for the best in the long run.  As of now, I think we should just move in to the house, decide what we really want to do and try to get Jason to work on our projects when he has time.

It is finally ours!!!!

The White house is finally ours

Ben was the first one through the door.  He was very excited

The house is starting to look empty

Despite the kids being gone this week, we haven't got as much done as we wanted to.  However, we have managed to get rid of quite a bit of our furniture and upstairs is beginning to look pretty empty!!!!

This is our room, the love seat is now downstairs because the chairs are gone

Maggie's room has no furniture left, I am using it to store boxes

Maggie is now in Greta's room

Ben's desk is gone

the bookcase is empty

Trip to the new house

We met the contractors at the new house on Wednesday. We keep changing our minds on what we are going to have done and when.  There are so many obstacles and road blocks.  I'm still not even sure what we are doing as soon as we get the house next week!!!  It'll all get done eventually-fingers crossed
I took some pictures of storage space so that we can start thinking about where we are going to put things.  This is our laundry area down in the basement.  There is a second dishwasher that will go eventually.  We plan to redo this and make it more like what we have now.

There are quite a few shelves in the basement, not sure if there are enough, but we will try to make it work until we can move some things around

We bought a new fridge to go in the basement.  They have a freezer too, so we'll have a little space where that is

They have started to pack up their things, our house needs to look like this too!!!!

The back yard is now grass!!!!!

This is the storage room at the back of the house, we haven't been able to see this for a while.  It used to have a bar in here!!!!

A little more storage, but we don't have a garage!!!!!  Every square inch is needed.....

We are starting to get moving....

Things are starting to look different in our house.  We have sold some of our furniture already.  The tapestry chairs and Sam's leather chair are gone.  We moved the love seat from our bedroom to the sitting room so we had something to sit on.  We have also sold Maggie's bookcase and the dresser out of Greta's room, they are already gone.  Ben's bed is sold and will be picked up next week and Maggie's bedroom furniture will hopefully be gone this week.  The house is also getting filled with boxes and I think we are getting to a stage where we will be ready to move.

The grass is laid.....

The pool has been removed and grass has been laid.  It looks very different now.....

Just waiting.....

We are just waiting for moving dates now.  Really need to get packing.  We have been trying to sell some of our furniture.  The tapestry chairs are gone, so the sitting room looks pretty empty..  We also sold the dresser in Greta's room and Maggie's bookcase.  The kids are going to Michigan with Jan and Julie tomorrow, so we will have a week to get motivated to start sorting things out.  Let's hope the motivation comes storming in!!!

Middlesex is on the market

Middlesex is on the market and Britani had an open house yesterday. They have done a fantastic job of cleaning it up.  In fact, Karen told me that it cost $600 to get the windows cleaned.  It was worth it, the house looks so much brighter inside.
http://www.cbgundaker.com/property/details/199614/MLS-15035996/6-Middlesex-Drive-St-Louis-MO-63144.aspx
The house has been staged and it looks so much better.  Luckily, we are all still happier that we chose White rather than this house.
Maggie approves on the bed in the master bedroom apparently!!!!

Very impressive tarting up of the master bathroom.  It looks so much better but still very small

The sitting room is lovely too.  Didn't get pictures of the rest of the house

Another visit to our new house

We met our designers at the White house on Friday morning.

They have already started working on tearing the pool out-it certainly doesn't look the same any more!!!

This is the back of the house.  We haven't been in this storage room since the Open House, they were using it as a bar, we are hoping we can get all our outside stuff in here!!!!

Ben's favourite room, he calls it the pool room.  He's not going to like it if we change it too much.  I suspect the fish will be leaving with the current owners

We got our Sold sign!!!!

The buyers got their loan commitment on Thursday and we got our Sold sign on Friday.  Happy day!!!!!  Now I just need to start packing for our move out at the end of July!!!

New developments (our crazy life)

I cannot believe that I haven't had time to do a house update since June 9, and so much has happened in such a short time.  We had our Patton house inspection done on Wednesday.  It was a really busy day.  We met the owner, the electrician and the design people (http://www.nextprojectstudio.com) first thing in the morning.  I spent 3 hours talking to the design people.  We decided that the kitchen would never work for us and we talked about how we could update it.  Sam talked to them about remodeling the bathroom in the basement and the unfinished part of the basement (including the laundry room area).  We left the house in the morning figuring that we would have to spend at least 50K on the house to make it work for us, even if just for a short while.

The first red flag of the day was the fact that the electrical panel was in the basement bathroom and would have to be removed to another location.  The electrician gave us an estimate to move it and Sam had already planned to upgrade it anyway, so it wasn't that big a deal.

The inspectors came in the afternoon.  They found several things that needed to be fixed.  In addition to the electrical panel, the garage roof needed to be redone and the siding needed to be fixed (it was too close to the ground) and there were a few minor things.  We got the written inspection report on Thursday and Sam had talked to Britani about writing up a reply to the inspection, we had until midnight on Thursday to do it.

When I got home on Thursday afternoon, Sam was on the phone with Karen talking about the house.  She told him that Britani had told her we were planning on spending a lot of money on updating the house.  Karen said it was a mistake to spend a lot on it because we would never be able to sell the house for that amount of money, even if we stayed there for a while.  The work that needs to be done on the house is really too much for us since we don't want to live there indefinitely.

When we first talked with Karen about selling our house (way back in February!) she had mentioned that there was a house on White that was going on the market.  The big drawback (for us) was that it had a pool.  Sam immediately said we would not be interested because of the pool.  Well, Britani had told me on Wednesday that their sale had fallen through (for the second time) and that they were going to fill the pool in.  When Karen was talking to Sam, she mentioned again that the house on White was still available and the pool was going.  We decided we would go and look at the house and met Britani there are 6:30.  We decided to write a contract on it and let the Patton inspection expire.  The sellers on White accepted our contract within 2 hours, so we went from a contract on one house to another in 6 hours!!!!  We are now on our 3rd house and they are on their 3rd buyers, so maybe this is some kind of numerology karma....

This is the link to the house:
http://www.cbgundaker.com/property/details/187600/MLS-15023395/9380-White-Avenue-Brentwood-MO-63144.aspx

We got the inspection report from the previous buyers and have written a reply to that.  Just waiting to hear.....

General update

We are having the house appraised today.  Last step in the process.
The Northcote house is under contract (if only it would have worked for us)
Berry Ave is an open house on Sunday (couple of blocks from us).  May have to look at it out of curiosity

Instead, this will be number five. Not sure for how long....

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/2331-Patton-Ave_Brentwood_MO_63144_M73253-96616
This teeny tiny house (for us) is going to be our #5.  We decided to make an offer on this house and it was accepted.  The mortgage payment will be half what we were looking at paying in rent.  We are doing this process one step at a time.  We sold our house, now we have something in Brentwood before the start of the school year.  We are trying to decide if we can get all our stuff into this home or have to put some in storage.  Hopefully we can cull enough to make it work.

This is the incredibly narrow stairway into the basement

 Bathroom on the main floor

 Maggie's bedroom

 Our bedroom

 Ben's bedroom in the basement

 Family room in the basement

 Dining room

 Looking from the dining room into the front room

 Kitchen