well, really we just bought a house, but it might as well have been a farm.
my mom says my grandpa has a saying that goes something like, "you just
tied your fanny to a tree." i don't even know what context that comes from,
but i'm pretty sure it applies to our situation.
we've been married almost 5 1/2 years, and in that time we've lived in an apartment
where we didn't once turn on the heat all winter (little did we know that we were
probably only saving like $12 a month, but we were broker than joke and just living
on love), lived in a mortuary for 2 1/2 years...a mortuary. where i had to do very
little, but richard had to retrieve the deceased at all hours of the night to pay our rent.
as much as we complain about that period of time, we have such great memories of
living so close to our best friends, and again, living on love. most recently we lived
in a basement apartment (right across the street from the mortuary) under some other
good friends. every once in awhile we'd talk about buying a house, but then a great
trip would present itself, or we enjoyed not having the responsibility of owning a home.
this summer, we finally decided to face our commitment issues and start looking.
after a couple of failed short sale attempts, we found the perfect house. richard knew it
was perfect long before i did, but eventually i came around. once i did, this is how
it all played out:
we worked with our amazing realtor, joel carson, to make it ours.
this is us at closing. he was the greatest and we'd recommend him to
anyone. plus, he has a pig for a pet, so that's like 50 bonus points.
after closing we went to order our carpet. then we went to lunch, and the
whole thing started to sink in a bit. at this point i thought richard might throw up.
but my enthusiasm rubbed off just enough to keep it down.
the next night, after we'd gotten the keys, we went to the house to open
the couple of house-warming gifts we'd gotten from richard's co-workers
and joel.
that weekend we cleaned like we've never cleaned before. we had some
amazing friends show up to help. and my dad deserves a medal of honor for
all that he did for us that weekend. my energy was about spent until jenkins
and myself started pumping the jams whilst cleaning away. snow white was
right, whistling/singing and dancing while you work is just the ticket to getting
the job done without wanting to kill someone.
i didn't take one picture of moving day. that's how busy we were. but
eventually we got all of our stuff into our new place. since the carpet wasn't going
to be installed for another week we had to pile (yes, pile) everything we owned in
our front room.
it felt a little like we were squatters or something, but it didn't last long.
this is the carpet that was on our stairs.
big surprise that we didn't want to keep it. richard and scott
ripped it out before the carpeters came, so we didn't have to
pay for them to do it.
we eventually got organized enough to have a few visitors. scott and megan
jaunted the rest of the way up on their trip to happy valley to check out our new
digs. kaycee and the rest of the anderson crew popped in for a little visit, too.
once the carpet was in we could move everything in the front room to its
rightful place in the house, and there was finally room for our charlie brown
christmas tree. i wouldn't say it was like pulling teeth to get richard's help with
the tree, but something close to that would be accurate.
there are so many things we love about our place:
its in ogden (5 1/2 years ago that wouldn't have been true)
its brick
the yard isn't too big or too small
the ward is amazing
covered parking...lots of it
minor fix-ups required (for richard)
that richard wants to do the minor fix-ups (for rachel)
there's plenty of room to invite people over
that we can't touch the ceilings without stretching
storage space...we've never seen so many closets!
among other things...
i can confidently say that richard's favorite thing about our house is that he
has his own band room. a room that is strictly designated for his instruments
(which are all under same roof he is for the first time in about 7 years) and
rocking out. they jammed on christmas eve, and the day after christmas, too.
i think we can expect plenty more of this.
some things we won't miss:
the tile downstairs. its now covered by the cushiest carpet our money
could buy.
scraping ice from our windshields. already, on more than one morning as
i've driven to the gym, i've snickered at the suckers who have ice frozen to
their windows. never. again.
i don't think i'd trade our time spent living in our other apartments, because
we really have so many awesome memories from each one. i'm so grateful for
all of the places we've called home, and especially for this new one.
