Chh Chh Chh Chh Chhanges!

It's nap time and both kids are sleeping. The house is somewhat clean, dinner is somewhat planned out and I'm feeling somewhat on top of my "to do list." When all these things align, I can blog!

OK so, where were we. Oh yes, we bought a house, sold a house and bought a van.

First, the most important and longest of the stories, we bought a house - We headed up to Connecticut March 16-18. It was dang cold but luckily no snow to deal with. The kids did pretty well on the flight. Actually Jackson did amazingly well, didn't make a fuss once and Abbie did just alright. She's getting harder and harder the older she gets! But when we got there we drove around for a little bit, got set up at our hotel and grabbed lunch at Panera. Tyler wanted me to feel as comfortable as possible so eating at a well-known and loved restaurant for lunch helped quite a bit.

The thing that is going to take a while to get used to is how old it all is. We're driving through Simsbury, CT and all the signs keep saying "established 1670" just to give you an idea. Also the suburbs west of Hartford are really rural feeling and there are trees everywhere. That's not really a bad thing, just going to take a while to get used to. Supposedly that town, Simsbury, is one of the best towns to live in and is well loved by all who live there. While driving through it I just kept waiting to see something that wowed me but it didn't happen. It's cute and quaint but I'm not quite sure why honestly it has such appeal? Maybe it will grow on me. Anyways, we ended up buying a house in a neighboring city but considered houses in several towns.

We looked at houses in Burlington, Canton, Avon, Simsbury &... I think that's it for this day but we also considered Granby, Weathersfield, and West Hartford. All the houses had pluses and minuses and I had looked at them so many times online before arriving, it was kinda weird actually being in the homes I had already memorized in my mind. We were looking at houses built or majorly renovated in the past 30 years (which limited our search dramatically). We wanted a good street or neighborhood (which also limited our search dramatically). Only one of the houses we looked at (the one we bought) had a sidewalk in the neighborhood. We were looking for a decent size yard, but small flat driveway that wouldn't be hard to maintain in winter time. All the houses we looked at were 4 bedrooms and all around the same size of our current house and in our price range, which was another huge limiting factor. Some had pools, but I really didn't want or need one with a pool because it would just sit there unused 10 months out of the year! With these restrictions we didn't have a ton of houses to choose from, but there were some pretty good options.

There were a few beautiful large homes with pools, but they were all a little more rural and would be a longer commute for Tyler to work and to get to the airport. There was a beautiful home with an out-of-this-world renovated kitchen, covered porch and huge bedrooms - but it was basically in the middle of a forest with no neighbors in sight. There was a smaller modest home in a cute neighborhood in Avon with a smaller kitchen, amazing basements and 4 rooms all upstairs. The price was much lower than any other house we were looking at also, so this is the house we chose! Another reason we chose this house is that we went to the ward on Sunday and connected with so many great people, it made us officially decide to make an offer.

While it's definitely not the most flashy on the outside or updated on the inside, it will be a perfect home for our family. The main level is much smaller than we're used to but that just means it will be easier to keep clean, right?? Also the kitchen is pretty outdated, so we are planning on redoing the appliances, counters and cabinets soon, which we're excited about! (Since the price was lower, we feel we can do this and have some fun with it) The four bedrooms upstairs are not huge but will fit our family with a guest bedroom for now, and have room for more kid(s) in the future :) The best part about the house in the basement. It's 700 square feet and I'm viewing it as kid central. I'm hoping to keep all the toys down there, we can have the train table there as well as future toys (I'm picturing a kitchen set, play house, easel, arts and crafts center) It will be great. We can also have an office space down there as well as a tv and couch hangout area. It will also be great to have guests stay down there when we have lots of people visiting or in a couple years when we don't have a guest bedroom anymore! The backyard is a large grassy area that is pretty flat compared to others we saw. It backs up to a forest which is kinda crazy but hopefully the kids don't venture off in there since it's blocked by some prickly bushes...

The house is very close to the major shopping area of the area - (almost too close, you drive through an ice cream shop parking lot to get in the neighborhood). It was a turn off at first, but eventually I've gotten used to the idea. Once you're back at the house you don't realize where you are.  Some of the houses we looked at were 10 minutes to a grocery store, this one is 1 mile or less from 3 or 4 stores. We've got all the major stores you could want within 5 minutes - other than Target, so sad! But all in all it's going to be a great house and a great little ward and we are excited!

Abbie looked too cute, waiting for our luggage in CT.

This is what I saw all weekend, a blur of trees from the car window. We were in the car A LOT!

Letting Jackson play at the Hartford library, downtown.

I realized I didn't take any pictures of myself on this trip, chilling with the kids while Tyler handed in our deposit check to the realtor.

Not the best pic, but here is our family after buying a house in CT!

Back in Florida and Jackson gets a turn in the stroller, that iPad saved our life that weekend.

OK the second thing to mention, we sold our house. It's been in the works for a while now but it officially is going down. We sold to our good friends Jon and Semra Eichelberger. We had always joked about them buying our house, or the house next door and how fun it would be to be neighbors. Right now they are renting a place a couple streets away and we love hanging out with them! So now they will be taking over our house and we can always come visit the place when we come back to Florida. We have been incredibly lucky in that the real estate market has gone up again here in Windermere. We bought at the lowest point of the market and now are selling at a bigger gain than we expected for only living here for 3 years. We have had multiple real estate agents, appraisers, and inspectors to our house these past weeks and now it's done and I'm just so glad we don't have to worry about listing our house and keeping it clean for showings!

And lastly, we bought a van! Wow never thought I'd end that sentence with an exclamation mark but it's a pretty sweet ride. We have to turn in Tyler's company car this week so we decided to just go for it when we found a van with the right price. Tyler negotiated like a champ and we got an amazing deal on a brand new 2013 gray Honda Odyssey.

When we got the car it had 1 mile on it, seriously. And just today it hit 200 miles, so we've driven it just a bit but I still need to read the owners manual to make sure I know how to use all its ammenities! It's got a leather seats, a tv/dvd player with wireless headphones, fridge, rear camera, automatic doors, wireless, a hard drive where we can store hundreds of songs from cds, and so much storage! I never thought I'd drive a van but what do you know. We looked at other cars, but after sitting in the van, the suvs just didn't compare inside!

And that about wraps it up! So we bought the house March 18, got the paperwork started to sell our house March 19, bought the car March 20, then I threw a birthday party for Jackson March 21. It was a busy week to say the least, but we are so incredibly blessed and excited for these changes ahead!

More about Jackson's Birthday, and Easter to come (soon hopefully)!