What a year (or three) it was!

Thank you everyone who has been reading and commenting. I haven't posted in a while...hardly at all actually, but it's not for lack of material. Life got so busy and complicated that I couldn't boil down everything that I wanted to say into a post. And then so much time had passed that I didn't know how to wrap things up to the present. Call it blogger inexperience, or just say that I was to shell shocked by life as it was happening to write about it. I will try and make amends now and bring everyone up to speed so I can actually blog in real time. I'll break it down this way:

The house situation: OYE the house situation. The short of it is, as all of you know, is that my husband and I bought a lovely, but small, house way back in 2002, not thinking that we would ever need more than 2 bedrooms. With the birth of our twins, and then the birth of our daughter, we exceeded our house's capacity and needed to move on. So began over 2 years of agony and heartbreak. We fell in love with a beautiful, giant of a Victorian house. Then we lost it to a buyer who came in with a cash offer. We couldn't compete with that, and I was heartbroken. Words can't describe how terribly miserable I was. So we continued looking, and looking...and looking. Then we went back and revisited a house we seen just prior to the one we lost. We liked it, a lot, although I wouldn't allow myself to fall in love with it. My husband on the other hand was smitten. It was a spacious, but not overwhelming, Colonial built in 1804. The asking price was good, so we decided to give it a go. So began our time in short sale hell. Back and forth with the bank, months of waiting, more back and forth with the bank, more waiting...and finally a closing date. Two days before closing while I was online making sure we had all the paperwork in order I noticed that there was FHA paperwork in the file. OH NO....Our loan officer had set us up with an FHA loan, that we couldn't have because our existing first home loan was an FHA, and you can't carry two at once. For this purchase to happen we would have to sell our first house IN TWO DAYS. Obviously, that wasn't going to happen. We had intended to buy the other house first, move, and then sell our other house. (Good thing, too, because we didn't want to be in homeless limbo.) Crappity craptastic. Back to the drawing board.

Hoping that the colonial wouldn't sell...or go into foreclosure...by the time we sold our home, we put it our existing home on the market. In the time we had been looking we had slapped a lot of lipstick on that pig. We had painted the kitchen cabinets and redone the hardware, bought a new fridge and hood and re done the floor. We painted and tiled the shower surround, and painted the dining room and made into an ad hoc bedroom for the twins. Then we put in on the market, right at the end of June beginning of July 2010. We were asking rock bottom for our house, we just wanted it sold so we could move on, and it worked. By labor day our house was sold. Yeah! Not so yeah was the condition of the colonial we wanted. Over a year of not being lived in had left it sad, dirty, and with a broken heating system. And, much to our horror, the bank had given the house to a new banker who hadn't kept up on anything, and wouldn't respond to our new offer to buy it. Here we were with three really little kids, and soon we would have nowhere to live! And to make a rough situation even worse, we were trying to be proactive about the boys going into kindergarten and we had no idea where they would be going. Closing was October 29th. Sooo....

I began looking for another house. Our realtor wanted us to look at rentals while we continued trying to purchase the colonial, I told her to go shove it. I started researching houses like mad. Then one evening in bed, going through yet another long search, I saw it. My dream home. It was big, old, and beautiful, and in excellent condition. It was also out of our price range, by a lot. I saw that the price had dropped dramatically already a couple of times, and a little voice began whispering "you can do it, you know you want to, it's meant to be". But our realtor didn't want to show it to me! She told my husband it would just break my heart. Grrrr...... I pushed and she finally agreed to show me the place. I loved it, naturally, lovey lovey looooooved it. I then had to convince my husband to see it, and he liked it. To make a veeerrrry long story short, we put in a ridiculously low offer, the seller took it (hey, times are rough, and we lucked out BIG time) and after a furious whirlwind of packing and moving, we are here. More than 6 months later and I still hug and kiss various parts of it on a regular basis. :)

next time I will tackle NB's frightening mystery illness and autism diagnosis, my husband the traveling engineer, and other catch up stuff.