Preparing to Move

This is my last night in the old house before our big move across the country. I'll be totally honest, I haven't done diddly squat to get ready for the movers next week. I took Piper for a walk last night around the neighborhood once it started to cool off a little, and it made me a little sad to think that we won't be here very much longer. This move is going to be really good for us. We're moving into a bigger house, James is at a great place in his career progression, I'll be starting nursing school next summer, and hopefully we'll be bringing a baby home soon. We're finally starting to move forward in our lives after having been stuck spinning our wheels for so long. But it's still going to be hard.

Every time I hear Miranda Lambert's new song "The House that Built Me" I practically start bawling my eyes out (which is quite problematic when I'm driving in the car). I don't know why I'm so sentimental for this place all of a sudden. I'm not even gone yet and I'm already sad about leaving my childhood home behind. Growing up, I couldn't wait to move away from this city. When I finally graduated high school and prepared to follow James to college, we joked about how we would NEVER move back. EVER! Four years later, we were moving into our first house... in our old hometown. It was an ironic twist of fate that the military sent us back here, but it worked well because it allowed me to finish school (which is obviously very important).

I wasn't especially excited to be back, although it's very nice to be so close to my parents who live just across town. This city certainly has many flaws, but over the last four years we've managed to build quite a community of friends and family who love and support us. The experience we went through last fall is the best testament to that I will ever have. As hard as it was to go through a disrupted adoption, I have never felt more surrounded by love in my entire life. As empty and devastated as I was feeling, I knew that we had already been blessed beyond measure. We had people we could count on to be there for us when we were in a very dark place. I'm going to miss them very, very much.

There isn't a ton for me to do before the movers arrive on Tuesday to begin packing up our household goods (gotta love the perks of moving for the military). Mostly I just need to separate out the things I'll be moving myself like my wedding dress and wedding mementos, all our photo albums, and some sentimental keepsakes that belonged to James' father and grandfather as well as clothes and toiletries for me to live on for a couple of days. I'll be staying with my parents while the rest of our stuff gets packed up and while I work on cleaning the house and preparing it for our new tenants who arrive on the 5th. As soon as they arrive, I'll be hitting the road for the long, 18-hour drive with Piper to the new house. I can't wait!


And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

Our New House!!

After many months of an exhaustive home search and dealing with the stresses and anxieties associated with selling a home, we FINALLY have a resolution to our situation. Earlier this week, we signed a leasing agreement with a couple who's going to rent our old house. At the same time, we also put in an offer to buy a new house that, after some counter-offering, was eventually accepted. We went with our Realtor this morning to the new house for the home inspection (and so that I could measure all the windows to make new curtains). While I was there, I took a bazillion pictures to send my parents back at home.

The house, originally built in 1980, was obtained by the seller in a foreclosure. We saw the pictures from when the house was foreclosed on and it looked TERRIBLE. But the seller completely renovated the home including: new roof, new hot water heater, new heating and AC unit, new siding, new floors (carpet, hardwood, and ceramic tile), new counters, all new fixtures, new kitchen appliances, new master shower, custom master closet, and new back porch. The house is 2,500 square feet and has three bedrooms and two fulls bathrooms. The two car garage has an automatic garage door AND a workshop for all of James' manly man projects. The house sits on 1.25 acres, bordered on two sides by farmland. It's country living, but only five minutes from the rest of town.

The formal living room will become our reading/yoga room and the den will be used as our family room. There's no formal dining room, but since I don't actually have a formal dining table I don't see that as much of a problem. James is going to hang a tire swing from the big tree in the back yard for me and we're going to build a big picnic table to put somewhere in the shade. I want a hammock, but I've yet to figure out where that will go.... or the clothes line, or the vegetable garden, or the fire pit, or any of the other things I want to do with the property. I'm just so excited that I can hardly stand it!

The Death of My Self-Esteem

First of all, I do not recommend that ANYONE try to sell a house when waiting to adopt a baby. Conversely, don't try to adopt a baby while you're also trying to sell your house. It's absolutely terrible for self-esteem, at least it is for mine. This is going to sound stupid to some people, but I'm going to say it anyway because it's what I'm feeling and it's honest. Adoption is hard on the self-esteem when you've had to wait for months and months, it just comes with the territory. We've been waiting since the disruption for roughly seven months. Every time I call our agency to find out how things are going, they tell me that our websites are getting lots of hits and that our profile has gone out to lots of birthmothers and that everything looks great! Um, well yeah... but we're still waiting. Clearly that means there's something wrong with us and we'll never get picked to adopt a baby! Well no, but it can feel like that sometimes. And when the months of waiting drag on and on and on... it can be easy to let those thoughts into my head. But I have to remind myself that our baby is out there somewhere, we just haven't figure out where he/she is going to come from... or when. 

In a strange way, selling a house can elicit the same sorts of feelings. Your home says a lot about who you are. And if you've put as much into your home as I've put into ours, it can be hard to take any sort of criticism from realtors or potential buyers. Each time a potential buyer comes to a showing and decides to go with some other house, it's like a slap in the face. Well, not exactly like a slap in the face, but it's still a rejection. Whatever the reason, they're still rejecting us again and again and again. And while it's not anything personal, it's still frustrating and hard to cope with sometimes. 

Combine the two situations and you've got the perfect storm. Everyday is a new rejection. (And I won't even begin to touch on the old issues this brings up for me.) No baby, no offers on the house. Nothing. And there's nothing we can do about it. Nada. But maybe that's the point. Maybe this whole scenario is a lesson for me in patience. I've said for a long time that my greatest flaw is my terrible impatience. I've always been like that. When I want what I want, I want it NOW. Not ten minutes from now, not tomorrow, not next year. NOW! But I can't always have what I want now, obviously. And I keep saying that I've learned the importance of being patient, but clearly I haven't because it's still driving me totally batty! 

What can I say except that I'm a work in progress? At least I am able to acknowledge my flaws and how important it is to change them. I know that eventually someone will fall in love with our house and want to buy it. And in my heart I know that our perfect birthmother is out there somewhere, waiting for us as much as we are waiting for her. Hopefully I'll be able to endure this time of waiting with at least a little bit of grace and poise.

The House Hunting Trip

Most of you know that James and I went on our house hunting trip at the end of April. I was really excited about this because I've been looking at real estate listings online for at least a year. I'm not kidding. For a while I really wanted to build again. So I'd been online looking at floor plans and researching custom home builders. When I went out to see James last fall during training, I actually met with one custom builder and discussed what plan we'd like and what area we might want to build in. In fact, we'd gotten to the point where I was waiting for him to email me a rough estimate of how much our selected plan (and the custom modifications) would cost based on the cost of construction materials at the time. He never did. I suspect the problem was that the builder had so much going on at the time that we just got lost in the mix. After all, we weren't going to contract with him for at least six more months and he had his hands full with current clients. So I can't fault him too much, but it annoyed me none-the-less. 

Once we got our orders to PCS a month or so ago, we realized that we really wouldn't have enough time to have a home built. Most builds take at least four months from clearing the lot to the final walk-through. But we're moving during the peak build season, so I'd be willing to bet that a custom build would take at least five months or more... if you want it done right. And I decided that I didn't want to be stuck five states away during the construction process. I would want to be close enough that I can check on the progress and speak up about things I want changed as I see them so there's time to get everything right (ie, "No I don't like that light fixture anymore. I want to go back to the store and get a different one."). After all, if you're going to go through all the trouble to build a custom home, then it should be exactly and perfectly right. 

So we decided to put off our custom build for the next PCS and just buy an existing home instead. The good news for us is that the area we're moving to has tons of new developments going up. So even if we don't get to have our custom home, we can still have a brand new one. I'd made contact with a real estate agent recommended by USAA (so we can get the Mover's Advantage Bonus Check... cha-ching!) about a month ago. She and I had been in constant contact ever since. She wanted to know exactly what our needs are and what kind of home we're looking for so that the house hunting process could be as stream lined as possible. By the time we left to drive out there, I had about 30 homes on my list of houses to see. Unfortunately for us, many of them were sold out from under us before we even got a chance to see them. 

We were VERY lucky to have some wonderful friends who PCS'd ahead of us a few months ago and who invited us to stay with them while we looked for a new house. I cannot begin to express how wonderful this was. First of all, I hadn't seen my girlfriend since January and I'd missed her terribly. We're like two peas in a pod and it was so wonderful to get to see her again. Second, their dog and ours are best buddies (we have a picture of them together with "Santa Paws" from last Christmas, haha), so Piper was able to travel with us and had a great time playing with Dodge while we were out all day long. And third, we saved a TON of money by not having to pay for a hotel and restaurants for a week and a half. Talk about a life saver! Then there was the drama with the tornadoes... but that's another story for another blog post.

So long story short (ish), we left on Monday, arrived on Tuesday, met with the mortgage broker to get pre-approved on Wednesday morning, and headed out for showings on Wednesday around lunch time. We saw about 12 houses on the first day. Most of them were actually a little above our price limit because so many of the lower priced ones had sold over the weekend.