Way back in February of this year (2014, for those of you reading this in the distant future), Lori had started thinking that she might like to move somewhere with a bit more space than what we currently had. A little more land. A little more storage. Just a little more room in general. She had had to commandeer my library for a Pampered Chef work room and our two-car garage hadn’t been able to house two cars for over fifteen years. With the kayaks, it barely contained her little Scion xB, anymore.
So we went off house shopping. We hadn’t really made a decision to move, but it couldn’t hurt to see what was out there, right? We looked at a nice nine-acre farm with a pond and a bank barn, an eight-acre property with a very stately house (from the outside), and a lot of smaller properties with nice houses that just weren’t… right.
We finally made the decision to actually make the move because we really needed to have a contract on our house before anyone would take an offer on a house we wanted to buy. So we got our house all staged for sale and put it on the market in May. Thanks to exceptionally good advice from our real estate agent (thanks Pat Manalli!) and Lori’s hard work getting the house ready for showings, we got a full-price offer in two weeks. The offer we accepted had a June 20th closing date… and we had nowhere to go.
We put offers in on the two multi-acre properties I mentioned earlier, but we got out-bid on one and rejected on the other. In the mean time, Lori had noticed that this property (where we are now) was for sale and both of us had, for years, driven by it and made comments about how nice it was. It’s a nice corner lot on a back road with about an acre and a quarter. Woods on one side and nice neighbors (behind a tree line) on the other help make it a great location. The only problem was that it was a tiny ranch-style house, which didn’t exactly match up with our plan to upsize our living arrangements.
However, Lori went to the township building and asked whether the house could be expanded. With the help of the township guy, she found that there was a ton of expansion potential, so we got our agent to schedule a viewing the same day, went through the place, and decided to make an offer then and there… with a June 20th closing date (which was now only three weeks away!). We expected to get a good response on our full-price offer, but rejected on the exceptionally close closing date. To our surprise, the offer got accepted on both counts. We had somewhere to move!
Before we even moved out of our old house, we met with a builder (Co-Del Construction) to discuss expansion plans and that started the whole remodeling ball rolling. Now, finally, we’ve got finalized plans, finalized financing, and finalized building contracts. We should be starting our mega-project in less than a week and it will take about nine or ten months to complete… while we’re still living here.
Let the chaos begin!