It has been one heck of a summer! Back in mid April, we made the decision to put our house on the market. In order to do that and get what we wanted for it and hope that it sold fast, we put A LOT of work into it. We pretty much painted every room in the house or touched up paint, laid new flooring, freshened up the outside, redid some drywall, and lots (TONS) of other little repairs and touch ups. It all sounds so easy, but in actuality, it was the WORST six weeks EVER!! I can't even begin to scratch the surface of how hard we worked and how terrible the chaos was.
We started by packing up. We figured we would move out and live with family while the house was on the market. There was NO way I wanted to spend all summer trying to keep the house clean, fingerprints off the walls, and be "on call" for house showings. We thought by packing up all the "junk", the house would look better anyway. That was the easy part.
Then came the list of to do's that was a mile long. Every project seemed to snowball into something bigger (isn't that always the way??). In the middle of all of that, I was working two nights a week, Kate had end of preschool stuff (performance, graduation, picnic), I had a mega garage sale (how I pulled that one off, I still don't know), and we still had to do the day to day stuff that we normally did. The house was in utter disarray for WEEKS. Like refrigerator in the living room disarray. No washer and dryer because the laundry room was being painted and floor was being laid. (I spent my Mother's Day at the laundromat catching up on everyone's laundry). I lost my cool a few times and just knew I would probably die in that house before we ever made it to the finish line.
This picture kills me and pretty much sums up the craziness. Kate was baking cookies for a bake sale she was having at our garage sale. We had to move the stove back into the kitchen for her to do that, we had no kitchen table in there, notice the backer board on the floor ready for ceramic tile, and of course you can't miss the toilet in the background. The bathroom was getting new flooring, too. Oh... moments I never want to relive ever again!
Garage sale at Megan's house. The girls pretty much sold out of cookies!
This is pretty much what I looked like for six weeks straight. That little piece of painter's tape had been on my shirt for a good week, at least. I wanted to burn those paint clothes when I was done with them.
And our trooper children! They endured eating Happy Meals and Taco Bell (I never wanted to see fast food again!), eating off tv trays, having all their toys packed up, and mastered the art of walking down the hall without touching the freshly painted walls.
A few pics of preschool graduation: (Kate's class had to wear pj pants)
The day we met with the realtor to sign papers, my mom had just left an hour before (she's one of the hardest workers I know and even she said she had never worked as hard as we did that day/night) and she and I had been awake all day and night finishing up (she met me at my house when I got off work at 11 and we worked through the night, and all the next day until about 4:30 pm). I don't think I have ever slept so good as I did that night. We listed for higher than what we thought we would. Two weeks later, we had a contract on the house. It all went seamlessly and we closed July 18th. Hard work paid off. But, I wouldn't wish cramming that many projects into that short of a deadline (a deadline imposed by me, of course, but I knew May/June was prime time) on anyone!
While our house was on the market and after it sold, we were living with Mark's mom and were looking for a house. It is true that there are more buyers than inventory right now. Houses are flying off the market. A few we have really liked were already under contract. Then, I started to get in panic mode (in true Jen fashion) about Kate going to kindergarten and us having to find something by then, we were trying to rush the whole process and long story short...it just wasn't working out. Everyone told me this was not something we should rush on, and they were right. We didn't want to settle on something just so we could get Kate enrolled in school. SOOOO, another long story short, we decided to take a break from all the house hunting, stay with family, enroll Kate in the school in my parent's zone (where I went to school... kinda cool!), tuck some money away, let Kate start school, and then we will resume the house hunting soon. I think we were just trying to do way too much too fast, and right on the heels of all that craziness of getting our house on the market. Maybe this is God's way of telling us to just take a breather. :) A very welcomed breather, I might add. And in the end, Kate is in the school district we wanted her in (a big reason why we wanted to move back out this way before she started school).
The kids have had a GREAT summer!! The first week we moved out here, I think we met up with friends for playdates almost every day. We have slept late, spent days swimming, had so much fun with friends, gone a million places, taken a couple trips, and been lazy bums some days. We are loving being closer to family, Mark's work (we love how early he gets home now!), church, and just more things to do. I never thought we would be able to move out of Union with the housing market the way it was, but we did it. And I am SOOO thankful that our house sold so fast and I didn't have to worry about it all summer.
Hope everyone has had a fun summer! I promise to update more often (how many times have you heard THAT one??)
Just a snippet of our summer:
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