Our new House!

FINALLY! I actually started this post at the beginning of the month, but I just haven't had time to finish it! So here we are for those of you who have been waiting to see pictures (Candice!)... Our new house! I was hoping to have pictures of it decorated, but for one thing, it's not, and for another thing, we cleaned our carpets last night (with the sweet carpet cleaner that I got for Christmas! More on that later) and currently the couch is in the kitchen, so that wont really work. I'll take pictures as soon as its all put together. Sorry to disappoint.
What this post is really about, is our journey to finding a house, and the move. As most of you know, Brig and I lived in a nasty apartment that we HAD to get out of. If you missed that gem of a post, you can find it here: (I don't know how to make the "here" a link... You could say that I'm not very "blog savvy") http://pigandtara.blogspot.com/2009/12/home-sweet-ugly-home-good-ridance.html. Anyway, Brig's parents Mick and Becki were kind enough to let us move in with them! We moved in on Halloween, and were just going to stay until May and look for a new apartment when school got out. Well, in March or April, my boss came to me and asked if I would like to work full time and take a coworker/good friends job who was going to be leaving in August (Love ya Alexis!) I was definitely all for that! As soon as school got out and I was all graduated (hallelujah!) I started training to take her job. Brig and I talked about it for a long time and decided that with this promotion, our finances would allow us to buy a house! It was so exciting! The problem (I say problem just because I can't think of another word for it) was that I wouldn't actually be on salary until August, so we decided we would start looking around then. Mick and Becki reluctantly agreed to let us stay longer (Just kidding, they are the sweetest ever, although if I were them I would have kicked us out a long time ago!).
So now it's August and we're starting our home search! At first we thought we would get a townhome, but after finding out that interest rates were SO low and that when you factor in the $150/month HOA fee that the townhomes we were looking at had, that the price between that and having a full on house were not that much different. We found a realtor who was recommended by my sister and we went to work! His name is Josh Low and he works at Coldwell Banker just in case anyone is in need of a good, honest, way friendly guy to help you! We looked at a lot of houses and then decided to make offers on two. Unfortunately for us, the two offers we made came back with the LAMEST responses EVER! Josh said he had never seen that happen before. The first house came back and said not only was their offer not negotiable, but they weren't willing to pay closing costs, AND they wanted to put a clause in the contract that if the guy found a job in Logan before the closing date that they could cancel the deal. Umm, NO THANKS! How silly is that?! The other house wasn't willing to negotiate either, and the price was $10,000 more than the first home, and didn't have a sprinkling system (which was definitely a NO GO for us!). We were pretty bummed. By this time it was October and we weren't sure what to do. We had previously seen a house that I LOVED (mostly because it was brand new and it smelled like new house), but the problem was that the backyard looked like this:

We have two dogs, so we were really looking for something that had a large-ish backyard. However, after those other two offers failed miserably, we decided to check the house out again and ended up putting an offer in. And our offer got accepted! We ended up getting $10,000 off the asking price (which we're told is pretty good considering builders tend to be WAY less negotiable than a regular seller). So here it is:

Nicole also recommended another one of their friends to take care of our loan. His name is Kevin Janes and he works at Diversified Home Loans and he was totally awesome! He went right to giving us the lowest interest rate he could (4.25, amazing!) and said he could have it done in 30 days, which is FAST! Other brokers kind of skirted around the interest rate subject and said it would most likely be 45 days. Ours did end up being a tiny bit longer than 30 days of course, but it was no fault of Kevin's. The lending company was going through an audit so they were super slow. Kevin was awesome to hurry them along, and I know he stressed out about it a lot. I was really glad we went with him. I had heard horror stories about people having to wait two EXTRA months on top of what they already planned on (Emily!) so I was totally happy with only two extra weeks.
Anyway, so here are some pictures from before we moved in. I promise the house is not nasty yellow, it's just the lighting and I only took my point and shoot :)

The kitchen. We had to buy a fridge, but it was worth it :)

Dining room sort of area. We're not super fond of the laminate floors and hope to upgrade to hardwood sometime in the future. It'll do for now though!

The kitchen again, minus a fridge.

This is the Master bedroom. This picture doesn't do the size justice. It's actually a really big room for a 3 bed 2 bath house. It's about twice as big as the one in the first house we made an offer on!

Again, much bigger than this picture makes it look, but this is our walk in closet. Yay! Storage was a HUGE problem in our apartment, so I was super glad to see this.

Our bathroom... Pretty standard. Again, I promise it's not nasty yellow.


Moving Day!
Brig and I are both really busy since he's in school and working, and I'm working full time and have kind of a crazy schedule. We decided to just knock it all out in one day! It was a Tuesday, so not many people were available to help, but we couldn't wait any longer! I took half of the day off work and we started packing! Yes, we weren't even really packed. The good news is that a lot of our stuff never really got unpacked, since we didn't need it. Mick and Becki were able to help us move a few things, and then our friend Jer came over later in the evening to help. He had literally just barely got back into town from being on vacation, so I was especially grateful for his willingness to help us out. He's been such an awesome friend! Thanks again Jer! My mom was in Germany at my sisters and my dad and brothers were all working! That happens when you move in on a Tuesday. It was also kind of a last minute move in, because when we went to close we still weren't even sure if everything had gone through. Luckily it did last minute, it just made it hard to make plans. We moved in the next day, on November 30th, 2010.

I was really excited to open the garage for the first time! That was one of the things that I was the most excited about having, haha. I HATE winter :)

Our first picture in our new house! Since we've been married, pictures of Brig have slowly gotten more and more ugly. I'm pretty sure he does it to protest me taking so many. Oh well though, I'm putting them up anyway!

Moving stuff into the living room. I finally got a couch cover for that couch, more on that another day. We also got a new TV which was exciting. Our old one was was literally older than me, so you can see why we might be in need of that. We actually ended up having to take it back because it had sound problems. We got a Samsung instead, so now we're good!

This is the office. Believe it or not, it's made a lot of progress, but looks about the same, haha. This picture was early on in the moving process. This room kind of ended up being the "put everything in that room and we'll sort it later" room.

The front door and hallway. I like that it's so wide. One of the things I really liked about the layout of the house was that our bedroom and the living room are in the back. Not something that you see too often in a house this size. Down the hallway there is the guestroom and second bathroom, and then on the left is the garage and on the right is the computer room and a closet.

Setting up our bed! Mick and Becki bought the bed for us and we love it! It is such a beautiful bed, and it's nice to have at least one piece of really nice furniture, haha. It is also really tall as you can see! I was a little nervous the first night that I was going to fall out! We finally got done setting it up around 2:30 AM, YIKES! I had to work at 8 the next morning too, so that was awesome.

Using our dishwasher for the first time! I know this is so dorky, but I was SO excited about it. We didn't have one in our apartment, and I hated it.

So here we are! Getting settled in. Sammy loves her bed, and Snoop is just happy as long as he's right by Brig.

We are so glad to be here. It was a long process and a long wait, but it was well worth it. We really love our house and our neighborhood! We're in our own little subdivision and have a private park that has a basketball court and big grassy area (which makes the small backyard not so bad) so that's really nice. Not for us yet, but maybe in the future. Our ward is a really good mix of younger couples and older people which is refreshing, haha. We were very warmly welcomed by our neighbors and an older couple in our ward even invited us over for Sunday lunch after church one day. Which was totally awesome by the way.
Anyway, that's all for now. It may be another two months (or another year!) before I can post pictures of it all put together, but we'll get there. My awesome friend Katie who is an AMAZING interior designer is giving me some advice, so I can't wait for that! But for now we're just happy to be here :)