We are building a house!!!

Some of you may know that we have been doing some work on our current house with the purpose of selling it and moving up in house.  We actually started back in September and have had some speed bumps along the way.  Back in September we had a realtor come look at the house and tell us what he thinks we could get for it and how much he thinks we could sell it for.  He gave us a list of things to do and said if we did that we could increase the price of the house.  So we did all of it and then some.  After coming back a couple weeks ago he then called and said there is no added value and we won't get anything back from all the time and money we put into this house.  Needless to say we were very discouraged!!  Actually I was REALLY MAD!!  We have been looking at houses for a while, trying to get an idea of what is out there on the market and what would fit our needs but weren't finding anything. 

Jay and I talked about it and decided that if there isn't anything on the market we like, then we need to take some time away from worrying about getting this house on the market and just wait until we feel ready.  We gave ourselves a few days and picked a couple houses each that we wanted to look at.  For one house we couldn't get a hold of the listing agent to show it to us and two houses were actually almost the same house and in the same development with no yard.  The fourth house on our list was a model home in Richland (off of Keene for you locals). 

I went through that house and looked at some of their floor plans and was pretty sure we had just found our house.  We went to look at the West Richland model to see if we would maybe rather be there.  After seeing the model home there Jay was pretty convinced too.  We went back to the first house and talked with the realtor there (Jeff Smart of Smart Realty, who I would highly recommend to anyone) and after talking with him we were 99%.  We went home and looked at the numbers and went over the budget to see if we really could get this house.  We took the kids to the model home the next day and they were sure!!  They were playing upstairs while we talked with Jeff Smart and telling each other to get out of their rooms!!! 

We signed our contract on Wednesday Feburary 1 and as of now our projected closing date is May 31.

So now we have to get back to getting our house on the market (probably another couple weeks because we have some other stuff going on this week).

If you go here you can see the basic floor plan for the house we are building. 

Next post will include changes to the floor plan and our meeting with the designer!