H Town Adventures: Beginnings of October '15 - Finding a House and Celebrating with Balloons

In the first two weeks of living here, we saw 27 homes. A good chunk of them I saw during the day while Ryan was at work. If there was one worth revisting, I would let Ryan know. We saw lots of regular listings, some short-sales, and some foreclosures. One thing I thought I would never ever want oddly became one of my priorities. An HOA. Weird, right? I never wanted to have to pay to live in a community, but I found a couple of homes that I really liked, but were in non HOA communities and they didn't show well. It doesn't matter how nice the home is if the neighbors yards look like junk. (Lesson 101 from our Casper house.) One afternoon, we tried to stop by a foreclosure, but the lock box code was wrong. We went and saw a few more, then our agent received the correct code, so we headed back. By this time it was already dark and seeing as it was a foreclosure, there was no electricity. (Or lighting actually. There were a couple lights upstairs that were still there, but most of the lighting had been removed. That's a foreclosure for you.) It was difficult to really get a feel for the place using the flashlight function on our phones, so we opted to come back in the daylight. Ryan fell in love. I was on the fence. It was in a really great neighborhood with two parks and a community pool. It was a good commute for Ryan and the price was great. The thing I didn't love about it was that although it is technically a 4 bedroom, the 4th bedroom is really just an office. It's right by the front door and no one would be able to really utilize it as a true bedroom, except for guests. Having a guest room is great, but for me, never knowing how long we are going to be in one place, I want to get something that we can grow into. I have no issue with kids sharing rooms, but I really did want that 4th room to be a usable bedroom. All things considered, it was a pretty silly thing to be hung up on. I guess the other part of it was that I really liked this other house we had seen a little farter south that was a two story red brick home. It was beautiful. But it did need a lot of work, was already at the top of our budget, and the schools weren't good. So again - silly of me to be hung up on a house that wasn't even a good match. I just really loved that it was different from most of what we had seen. I mean, we are in the southwest. Everything is adobe/stucco. And this foreclosure looks like every other house in the neighborhood. I don't like cookie cutter houses!

That being said... we did go back in the daylight and then we talked about it a lot. No, it wasn't my absolute favorite, but even I couldn't argue that it was hands down the best option for us. The ONLY negative thing about it was that 4th bedroom. But at least it had one! It may have even been the same night that we saw it a second time, or a perhaps the next day, but I had a really strong feeling that we needed to make an offer. If this was the house we wanted, we needed to act. Like right now. I remember asking Ryan again and again, "Is this is the one you want? How much should we offer? I'm not kidding Ryan. We need to call them now."

So we came up with an offer. It was already listed pretty low, especially for the neighborhood, but you always want to get it as low as possible, right? So we offered a couple thousand below asking price and held our breath. The house had been on the market for quite a while, so there was part of me that wondered why I felt such anxiety about making an offer right away, but you learn to listen to these things! The next day, we heard back from the bank with a counter offer. They countered! That means we were in negotiation! They countered with just a thousand off asking price, and it was already such a great deal that we said yes immediately. Right after that, we heard from our agent saying that the bank's agent had just forwarded him several rejection emails he had just sent to offers that came in just after ours. It had been on the market for a long time (probably just because it was a foreclosure and most people want move in ready - which this one was not), and the bank had even reduced the price several weeks before we saw it. I am so grateful I listened to that prompting to make an offer. (It was so strong and so insistent that I actually called our agent fairly late in the evening, apologized profusely, but told him we were ready to move - NOW, please.) Getting our offer accepted was just the first step, of course. And boy did we have some weird, fun, (I'm being sarcastic) hoops to jump through, but I'll touch on that a little later. For now, here are some pictures from the house - most of which we pulled from Zillow, as you can see from these screen shots.

The purple kitchen/dining room was really something. Houses down here are not shy in their color schemes. The violet itself wasn't a horrible color, but just not that much and definitely not in the kitchen. But hey - paint is an easy thing. Trust me, I'm pretty good with the painting thing by now. Haha. There were no appliances in the house (something that caused no small issue later) and all the lighting had been removed from the kitchen and dining room. Thankfully none of the wiring had been removed. That would have been awful.

The living room is a nice size, but has no lighting period. It wasn't removed. It was just one of those rooms where they only used lamps. And there was a hole in the wall where the doggie door had been. Even the door had been removed, which just kind of makes me laugh.

The upstairs master bath was really nice, but was painted a really nasty mustard/gold color. The lighting was also removed. The backyard is a really great size - especially in comparison with our Casper home. One thing I really loved is that it was evident there used to be grass. That was exciting simply because almost every other house we had seen was nothing but gravel, or sometimes just dirt. The fact that it wasn't filled with rocks meant that we could plant grass again! Yay!

Below are the office and half bath on the main level. I liked the paint colors in both of those rooms and thought I would be off the hook painting in there... but that didn't pan out.

Upstairs here is bedroom #1 that would become Devry's room.

This is the Master. It was painted a soft yellow. The color wasn't horrible - though not my first choice, but it was sloppily done. You could still see lots of spots where the previous red paint was bleeding through. No McDonald's theme for me, thanks. But the room itself is quite big. And has a really big walk-in closet. I told our agent on the second walk through that this may be the only time he hears this in his career, but I actually wished the room was smaller. I don't understand the need for a ton of extra room in a Master (though sure, it's nice). They could have gotten an extra bedroom in the space if they had condensed things a little. I'm weird. I know.

This picture is from the 3rd bedroom upstairs. It's actually really big. And another reason why I felt okay with the 4th bedroom really just being an office. There will be zero issue with kids sharing this room. And all of the rooms have really good closet space. This room is big enough for two sets of bunk beds. Not that we would ever need that - but just saying. ;) Ryan was waving to Pierscen in the backyard.

This is part of the view looking down from that window where Ryan was standing. You can see where it used to be grass, and Pierscen is visible in the lower right hand corner.

That room also has a pretty spectacular view of the mountains. The sunsets are pretty amazing. By the way, we learned that Sandia is the native word for watermelon. When the sun sets, the mountain turns red and the trees look like black seeds. Therefore - Sandia.

These next few pictures were taken at the park directly down the street from our house. (In fact, one of the first days in the house when I was dealing with contractors, Pierscen disappeared. I found him part way down the street taking himself to the park. AH!!! We had a pretty stern discussion about that. No 3-year-olds are allowed to take themselves to the park.)

Here you can kind of get the watermelon image...

With the ball moving forward slowly, we were able to do some fun things in between a lot of crazy house stuff (more of which will follow.)

Finger painting at Sharon's:

Enjoying the wonder of the Balloon Festival each day we drove Ryan to work. This is one thing we were really excited about when we found out we needed to be in ABQ much earlier than we had originally planned. The Festival takes place the first full week plus of October. There is nothing like it. It is impossible to describe the beauty of hundreds of hot air balloons filling the sky. It is incredible!

Next year we may make it to one of the morning launches, but you have to get up super early! This year we opted to go to the Glow-deo. (Fun shaped balloons that they fill up at night.) Those pictures to follow shortly.

One of the blessings of living with Sharon was that she watched her granddaughter one day a week and it gave Pierscen someone to play with. Making this move was actually (and still is) way harder on Pierscen than I ever imagined it would be. The first couple of weeks he almost refused to go to Sunbeams. He just begged and begged to go back to Wyoming. This is still a really painful subject. So having a friend for him was a lifesaver.

I attempted to do some school like activities each day, but it lasted maybe two days before he lost interested. This was from our "A" day and we learned about ants. :)