We love our house!!

Last Thursday we closed on our house!  Friday, the movers came with our household goods from Germany and we got to spend our first night here.  Caden woke up happy for about the first time since arriving in Texas.  He woke up in his new room with some of his toys and did not want to leave!!  We will not have a refrigerator until Monday, so we have been going out for breakfast.  We had a difficult time getting him out the door to eat breakfast, which is one of his favorite meals of the day!  Needless to say, we all love our new house!  Our furniture and everything fits beautifully.  Once we get internet set up and finish organizing and unpacking, I'll post pictures.

My parents are so wonderful, they watched Caden for us on Thursday when we did our final walk-through and closing.  Our closing should have only taken an hour, however, the mortgage broker tried adding an extra $1279 fee!  It was for lender's insurance, which is not something you really need, but was something that her company was going to pay as a promotion to use them.  Lets just say we were not going to close until that fee was removed.  Especially since we had to pay almost $9000 in closing fees!  We watch every penny we can.  :)

Friday, my aunt graciously watched Caden ALL day while the movers were here.  She took him to the park and he had a great time.  He loves his Aunt Karen!!  Collin and I helped the 5 movers put the boxes in the right rooms and I lined about half of my kitchen with contact shelf paper and immediately started unpacking boxes.  I pretty much emptied every box labeled kitchen so the movers could take some of the empty boxes away.  By the end of Friday, our house was a huge mess.  Shawn stopped by Friday to see our house and say hello. 

Saturday, my sweet friend, Emily, came over and helped!  She helped me organize my kitchen, clear my counters, played with Caden, and go through random boxes of toys and other goods.  Drew and Kristyl stopped by too.

Tomorrow our refrigerator is supposed to arrive.  Our awesome washer and dryer arrived Friday morning before anything else.  I feel completely spoiled!  I love it!  I've been washing clothes none stop.  It's huge and fits about 3x the amount of clothing as my German washing machine and cleans everything a lot better too.  I was even able to wash my comforter!  Sadly, I don't think I have ever washed that thing.  Now, I'll be able to easily wash it all the time!

We feel truly blessed to live in such a nice house and be back in America.  We enjoyed our time in Germany but it is great to be home.  Last weekend Collin took a few days off work and we went to see his parents.  I love that our families are now all within driving distance.  It was a LONG drive, but at least it's better than flying overseas.  Caden did great on his longest car trip yet.  It took us 8 hours to get there and 7.5 hours to get back.  I caught a terrible stomach bug that lasted 6 days.  Other than that, we had a wonderful time.  A few of Collin's nieces came to visit us and brought their kids.  I love his family.

Bounce House and New House

Yesterday, Caden and I met some friends at a Bounce House. The kids had a lot of fun burning off energy and the moms enjoyed watching them and talking. Caden and I got there right when it opened and had a room of bounce houses to ourselves for about 30 minutes. We did our first walk-through of our new house today. It took a little over 3 hours. My parents graciously watched Caden for us. We close on our house in one week! We are so excited! I bought our new washer and dryer online today and hope to schedule them to be delievered shortly after we move in. Now if only our household goods can be delivered next Friday we will be able to move right in. We've been in the car for over 8 hours now driving to my in-laws. This is Caden's longest car trip and we're still in TX! You could be half-way across Europe in this amount of time. We're looking forward to a long weekend with family. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Excitement!

We are so excited about finally finding a house!  Thank you for your prayers.  Every few days we go by the house and look at it thinking about what we need to buy to finish it out.  Caden loves seeing where his new room will be.  He's also excited about the new big trampoline we're going to get him for our backyard.  I'm just excited to have a nice size backyard.  Our lot is about 1/4 of an acre.  We were looking at buying an acre in the country and building a house out there.  However, I'm honestly glad we're not doing that.  Lots of yard means lots to water and right now this part of Texas is under a drought.

At the top of our list of things to buy are a washer and dryer.  I posted a question on Facebook about what kind of washer and dryer people recommended.  Thank you for your contribution.  I was really considering getting a front loader but now am back considering a top loader.  One main reason is because you have to leave the door open and knowing my adventurous son, he will eventually climb inside the washing machine if the door is left open.

Last night I paid for consumerreports.org for a year.  It's interesting to read what Consumer Reports recommends and then read the readers' reviews.  It seems like many of the "top" rated items have low consumer ratings.  I have a few requirements with this purchase.  I want a washing machine that really cleans clothes and can sanitizes them.  Hopefully we will have another baby and once we do, I would like to use cloth diapers again.  Caden has very sensitive skin and I think sensitive skin is in our genes.  So most likely we'll have to plan on doing that again with any future babies at least for a little while.  I also want a washing machine and dryer that are very quiet.  The other two requirements, something that won't lay wrinkles in our wrinkle-free clothes and something that is pretty fast.

Other items we need to buy include: bedroom set for Caden, a king size bed for us, a dining room table set, and media room or living room furniture.  We're probably going to purchase things in stages since we don't want to incur debt with our purchases.  First Caden's room, then our room, then the other rooms.  If you know of a good place to buy good quality furniture at a reasonable price, please let us know.

The other large item we are waiting on buying is another vehicle.  We're waiting to close on the house before purchasing this.  We're trying to decide if we want to pay cash for something or buy a new or almost new vehicle.  We hate debt and have learned that there are many advantages to not having a car payment.  So we will see.  I really want something that has rear air conditioning.  I have heard that minivans are great for young kids and I love the ones with automatic doors.  However, I like the looks of SUVs more.  There is just so much to consider. 

We are so grateful to God to be back in Texas.  We really enjoyed our time in Germany and are glad we did it but there really is no place like home.

We found house!!

We found a house!  Last week we made an offer on a foreclosure.  The bank wouldn't budge on the price and said they couldn't close until April 16th!  That would mean we couldn't move in until sometime in May because of the renevations we would need to do.  So we continued our hunt as we did not feel the other house was worth paying more for with all we would have to do to it.  Then we came to house #3.  We made an offer on Friday.  It's a new house and we are not using a realtor so we have more negotation room.  The sales rep took our offer to the builder on Monday.  Yesterday we found out they accepted our offer!  Hurray!! 

The cool thing about this home is it has just about everything we would want.  It's almost 100K less than the one across town.  It's close to Collin's job, the elementary school is rated the same as the "better" school on the other side of town, and we have family nearby.  Also, it's a new house!  They also will be able to close in possibly 2 weeks!  Another thing I really love is that all of the bedrooms are downstairs! We have a cool bonus room which can be a gameroom or media room upstairs. Otherwise, all bedrooms are down. After living in a 4-story house in Germany, I am ready to be on one level! 

The original family that had this house built put a lot of neat things in it.  Since they didn't follow through with it, the builder had dropped the price quite a bit.  I noticed in their model home that there was a 2K realtor bonus.  So our offer included that with additional things we would want, including a stainless steel refrigerator that matched the other appliances, gutters, a few custom plugs, and quiet automatic garage door opener.  There are granite counters in the large kitchen and master bath.  The house sits on an oversized lot and has a nice sized backyard and covered patio.  The house has 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a study, dining room, and upstairs gameroom or media room.  The house is around 2700 sq. ft. and includes a sprinkler system and tankless water heater.  It exceeds energy efficiency standards and our utility bills should be real reasonable this summer.  The community has a new pond being built and a swimming pool and club house.  They are hoping the pool and splash pad will be completed this summer.  This is a brand new neighborhood so there are a few "risks" to our decision to buy here.  However, I think we're going to be okay.  The builder is debt free, has a great track record, has been in business over 25 years, and builds beautiful homes.  I'm looking forward to joining our neighborhood HOA board and helping to organize neighborhood functions.

We are hoping to close in about 2 weeks.  If we go with the builder's preferred lender, they will be done with our loan application/process in 10 days.  We have one walk through next week and the final one will be scheduled for the day we close.  We are so excited to finally find a house.  We have been living out of suitcases for about 2 months.

Here are some pictures of our new house!

Our lovely house!

Kitchen

Master Bath 1

Master Bath 2

Backyard

Living Room

Master Bedroom