At the end of the school year last year, when I had reached the end of my rope trying to help a couple of struggling (academically and emotionally) kids, I sent an email to the enrollment coordinator at the charter school they had been in when we lived in AF, to see if I was still on the founding council, I had donated lots of extra volunteer time helping to set up the library when the school first opened 9 years ago, so that gave me "founding council" status. When you're on the founding council, your kids are placed at the top of the waiting lists to get in.
It turns out, the founding council is a lifelong status, so, yes, the kids would have a spot there very quickly. I immediately sent a text to Jeremy that said, "We're transferring the boys to Lincoln next year. I don't know how we'll get them there every day, but I am just so tired and that's where they need to be." Or something to that effect. That's kind of how I roll. When I get little bursts of inspiration, I act on them, without thinking much about everything that goes along with it.
"Wow." Jeremy replied. "OK, we'll have to talk about it when I get home."
So...now what? I thought. Driving them 1/2 hour each way to school every day is going to get old really quickly. And moving back seems crazy, I mean we've lived here less than two years.
But it wasn't even a few minutes later that I was on the Internet, looking at homes in the Northern Utah Valley area. I quickly came upon a house that I recognized. It was in our old neighborhood and belonged to some friends who were planning on relocating to Boston. I texted her to find out a little more about it, and it happened to be in our price range and filled our needs well.
Here's the big kicker: On the other side of the back yard fence of this home, lives our beloved school. I don't know if having a school behind your house is appealing to many people. It may have driven a few buyers away even. But it was appealing to me...my kids would be attending that school again, and they could go out the back gate to get there!
That evening, we drove to AF and walked through the house. It was funny because we didn't even care about details regarding the house. You know when you get an idea and the more you think about it, the more it just feels totally right? That's how this was. Moving back is what we needed to do. There was no question. We placed an offer on the home the next day, they accepted and we were officially under contract.
Because of the fact that they were relocating, our friends weren't interested in waiting for us to sell our home. So we had to take a big leap of faith and go forward without having sold our home first. Jeremy would have to use money from his business savings to make our down payment on the home, then we would recast the loan to get rid of the required mortgage insurance it after we sell, using our equity to pay back his business.
Crazy timing...our back yard was all torn up at the time. The landscapers had removed the waterfall and replaced it with an in-ground trampoline. The sprinkler system wasn't working well and the grass was thin in some places, so Jeremy decided to have the landscapers take all of the grass out and put a new sprinkler system and sod in. The yard looked like this when we decided we were going to sell.
It took a few weeks for the landscapers to get the time to finish the project (the owner was someone that Jeremy sends a lot of work to, so he was kindly doing the work at no cost to us.) It also rained a lot that month. So...we had to wait a few weeks before we could even put the house on the market.
Once the house was listed, there seemed to be a lot of interest in it. It was shown 4 or 5 times that fist week, then a few times the next. But the feedback that we heard was a little discouraging. People loved the house, but the tile countertops in the bathrooms turned them off.
Here's a picture of the Jack and Jill bathroom upstairs before and after I painted it a few months before. This bathroom was the most outdated of them all. The bummer is that I didn't take a picture after we had the countertops replaced. It looked so much better! We did a light beige granite with a white subway tile backsplash, and we painted the cabinets white.
So, in mid-June, we decided to invest in that bathroom, as well as the master and the powder room. Here is how the master bath turned out. It had 4" square travertine tile as the countertops and backsplashes around the counters and tub. We didn't want to spend another $500 replacing all the tile in the shower, so we had to choose something that would blend well with it. We ended up with a subway style travertine.
Here's how the powder room turned out. We matched it with the granite that was in the kitchen because it was close by.
As soon as the bathrooms were all done, it seemed that everything came to a complete stop. No one even came to look during the last couple weeks of June and the entire month of July. This was a little nerve wracking..we wondered what in the heck was going on. In one way it was nice because it was summer...the kids were home all day and it was hard to keep the house picked up and clean, but we were concerned!
Just for memory sake, I'm going to put all of the pictures that were on our listing in this blog post. It will be fun to go back and look at in years to come. You forget all the little details!
Here's the kitchen:
The Living Room:
The Deck
The Master Bedroom, just off the living room:
The entryway :
The laundry room (which needed updating, but we never got to it.)
The upstairs bedrooms:
The TV room above the garage (We called it the great room for some reason.)
The Toy Room upstairs:
The basement that we re-finished last summer so that we could rent it out (we added a kitchen and a bedroom and repainted and carpeted the whole thing):
The front of the house:
And the back yard that we just finished:
We moved on July 6th into our new house in AF.
During the month of August, things started picking up a little. Several people came every week to look at it and we ended up getting an offer about a week into August. The problem was that it was really low. After countering back and forth, we finally ended up coming to a number that we could settle on. But it was still about $20,000 lower than we wanted things to be.
It's so interesting how things all played out at the end. We were waiting for those buyers to sign the final counter offer. During that time, they were on a trip and one of them got sick and was in the emergency room. Don't know what happened,exactly, but it held things up for a day or two.
Well, it ended up being a huge blessing to us because another couple came to look at it and fell in love! Their realtor asked if we had any other offers, and it so happened that we did, which helped them to hurry things along. They sent us an offer the next morning for just $10,000 less than our asking price, with us paying NO closing costs! They were cash buyers! In fact, they wanted to close the next week...get this...one day before our first mortgage payment was due on our new home.
It was all so humbling. The Lord had things all under control. The appraisal came back good, the inspection showed an air conditioner that needed replacing soon, but they just asked for $2500 off the selling price for that. Things could have been much more complicated. It went down without a hitch, though.
This move has tried our faith, but we felt all along that things were going to work out. We needed to move to Springville two years ago so that we could learn what we needed to learn by shaking things up. It was really hard for Landon, who was a senior in high school at the time. It was just what he needed in order to prepare him to be the amazing missionary that he is. We're so glad we moved there and had that experience. But now that we have learned what we needed to there, it's time to come back home.
Everything has amazed us. The boys are all thriving at Lincoln again, Anya and Hazel have an INCREDIBLE special ed teacher at another school who knows their potential, pushes them and is teaching them skills that no one has known how to teach them before, and lastly, Jeremy was just called to be the 2nd counselor in our ward's bishopric. Not something we would seek after, that's for sure...but the bishop said that he felt very strongly that Jeremy is the person that the Lord needs for this calling right now, and we feel humbled and blessed by that fact. The ward boundaries just changed and our ward now includes some of the 12th ward, where we were before we moved to Springville. We are elated to get to associate with so many of our friends again and we're also excited for the blessings that will come because of Jeremy's service. It will mean more time away from home, which is hard, but he is truly happiest when he's serving. When Dad's happy, everyone's happy. ;)
So...that's the moving story in a nutshell! Summer 2015 was consumed by house selling, buying and moving. Glad it's in the past and feeling so blessed!
It turns out, the founding council is a lifelong status, so, yes, the kids would have a spot there very quickly. I immediately sent a text to Jeremy that said, "We're transferring the boys to Lincoln next year. I don't know how we'll get them there every day, but I am just so tired and that's where they need to be." Or something to that effect. That's kind of how I roll. When I get little bursts of inspiration, I act on them, without thinking much about everything that goes along with it.
"Wow." Jeremy replied. "OK, we'll have to talk about it when I get home."
So...now what? I thought. Driving them 1/2 hour each way to school every day is going to get old really quickly. And moving back seems crazy, I mean we've lived here less than two years.
But it wasn't even a few minutes later that I was on the Internet, looking at homes in the Northern Utah Valley area. I quickly came upon a house that I recognized. It was in our old neighborhood and belonged to some friends who were planning on relocating to Boston. I texted her to find out a little more about it, and it happened to be in our price range and filled our needs well.
Here's the big kicker: On the other side of the back yard fence of this home, lives our beloved school. I don't know if having a school behind your house is appealing to many people. It may have driven a few buyers away even. But it was appealing to me...my kids would be attending that school again, and they could go out the back gate to get there!
That evening, we drove to AF and walked through the house. It was funny because we didn't even care about details regarding the house. You know when you get an idea and the more you think about it, the more it just feels totally right? That's how this was. Moving back is what we needed to do. There was no question. We placed an offer on the home the next day, they accepted and we were officially under contract.
Because of the fact that they were relocating, our friends weren't interested in waiting for us to sell our home. So we had to take a big leap of faith and go forward without having sold our home first. Jeremy would have to use money from his business savings to make our down payment on the home, then we would recast the loan to get rid of the required mortgage insurance it after we sell, using our equity to pay back his business.
Crazy timing...our back yard was all torn up at the time. The landscapers had removed the waterfall and replaced it with an in-ground trampoline. The sprinkler system wasn't working well and the grass was thin in some places, so Jeremy decided to have the landscapers take all of the grass out and put a new sprinkler system and sod in. The yard looked like this when we decided we were going to sell.
It took a few weeks for the landscapers to get the time to finish the project (the owner was someone that Jeremy sends a lot of work to, so he was kindly doing the work at no cost to us.) It also rained a lot that month. So...we had to wait a few weeks before we could even put the house on the market.
Once the house was listed, there seemed to be a lot of interest in it. It was shown 4 or 5 times that fist week, then a few times the next. But the feedback that we heard was a little discouraging. People loved the house, but the tile countertops in the bathrooms turned them off.
Here's a picture of the Jack and Jill bathroom upstairs before and after I painted it a few months before. This bathroom was the most outdated of them all. The bummer is that I didn't take a picture after we had the countertops replaced. It looked so much better! We did a light beige granite with a white subway tile backsplash, and we painted the cabinets white.
 |
So, in mid-June, we decided to invest in that bathroom, as well as the master and the powder room. Here is how the master bath turned out. It had 4" square travertine tile as the countertops and backsplashes around the counters and tub. We didn't want to spend another $500 replacing all the tile in the shower, so we had to choose something that would blend well with it. We ended up with a subway style travertine.
As soon as the bathrooms were all done, it seemed that everything came to a complete stop. No one even came to look during the last couple weeks of June and the entire month of July. This was a little nerve wracking..we wondered what in the heck was going on. In one way it was nice because it was summer...the kids were home all day and it was hard to keep the house picked up and clean, but we were concerned!
Just for memory sake, I'm going to put all of the pictures that were on our listing in this blog post. It will be fun to go back and look at in years to come. You forget all the little details!
Here's the kitchen:
The Living Room:
The Deck
The Master Bedroom, just off the living room:
The entryway :
The laundry room (which needed updating, but we never got to it.)
The upstairs bedrooms:
The TV room above the garage (We called it the great room for some reason.)
The Toy Room upstairs:
The basement that we re-finished last summer so that we could rent it out (we added a kitchen and a bedroom and repainted and carpeted the whole thing):
 |
| Tile countertops once again. Didn't replace these ones. |
The front of the house:
 |
| We added these steps last fall, just after we finished the basement |
We moved on July 6th into our new house in AF.
During the month of August, things started picking up a little. Several people came every week to look at it and we ended up getting an offer about a week into August. The problem was that it was really low. After countering back and forth, we finally ended up coming to a number that we could settle on. But it was still about $20,000 lower than we wanted things to be.
It's so interesting how things all played out at the end. We were waiting for those buyers to sign the final counter offer. During that time, they were on a trip and one of them got sick and was in the emergency room. Don't know what happened,exactly, but it held things up for a day or two.
Well, it ended up being a huge blessing to us because another couple came to look at it and fell in love! Their realtor asked if we had any other offers, and it so happened that we did, which helped them to hurry things along. They sent us an offer the next morning for just $10,000 less than our asking price, with us paying NO closing costs! They were cash buyers! In fact, they wanted to close the next week...get this...one day before our first mortgage payment was due on our new home.
It was all so humbling. The Lord had things all under control. The appraisal came back good, the inspection showed an air conditioner that needed replacing soon, but they just asked for $2500 off the selling price for that. Things could have been much more complicated. It went down without a hitch, though.
This move has tried our faith, but we felt all along that things were going to work out. We needed to move to Springville two years ago so that we could learn what we needed to learn by shaking things up. It was really hard for Landon, who was a senior in high school at the time. It was just what he needed in order to prepare him to be the amazing missionary that he is. We're so glad we moved there and had that experience. But now that we have learned what we needed to there, it's time to come back home.
Everything has amazed us. The boys are all thriving at Lincoln again, Anya and Hazel have an INCREDIBLE special ed teacher at another school who knows their potential, pushes them and is teaching them skills that no one has known how to teach them before, and lastly, Jeremy was just called to be the 2nd counselor in our ward's bishopric. Not something we would seek after, that's for sure...but the bishop said that he felt very strongly that Jeremy is the person that the Lord needs for this calling right now, and we feel humbled and blessed by that fact. The ward boundaries just changed and our ward now includes some of the 12th ward, where we were before we moved to Springville. We are elated to get to associate with so many of our friends again and we're also excited for the blessings that will come because of Jeremy's service. It will mean more time away from home, which is hard, but he is truly happiest when he's serving. When Dad's happy, everyone's happy. ;)
So...that's the moving story in a nutshell! Summer 2015 was consumed by house selling, buying and moving. Glad it's in the past and feeling so blessed!
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