Our house is nearly done!

Chris was in Jacksonville last week so he swung by the house for a little peek.

It's fun to see the changes that have been made in the week since we've been gone!

Sold! To us!  (Well sorta, we haven't closed or anything yet)

The sod is down!

They added the Ledgestone to the bottom of the house.  Love the color and the way it looks.

The staircase has been put in and the carpet laid down.  Love the staircase!  Much better than the temporary pipe railing they rigged up.

Chris will be back in Jacksonville again at the end of the month.  Hopefully they will have installed the kitchen and he can take some more pictures of the inside.

House Hunting

So, several months ago, Chris' company Network Solutions was bought out by Web.com  Unfortunately the company decided to shut down the offices here in the St Louis area.  Fortunately, they offered Chris a promotion.  However, this also meant we would need to relocate our family to Jacksonville.  So, when the kids finish the school year, we're off to sunny Florida.

We looked at six gazillion homes on the internet.  We even put in an offer on a great house in a great location that we hadn't even seen.  There was multiple offers and ours wasn't accepted.  It seemed like no sooner did I let the agent know we were interested in a house, that house would be under contract.   We weren't gelling with our agent.  I was started to thing we were going to have to live in a tent.

With a new agent, and a list of homes to go see, off we all went to Florida in search of a new home. 

Wow!  I never knew house hunting could be so completely exhausting! 

We looked at so many houses I could barely keep them straight.  One house was great but it was a short sale and we need a firm move in date.  Another great house, this one a bank foreclosure, had horrible stains all over the carpet, another home didn't have enough natural light, the next house smelled like dog.  We considered new builds but the first one we looked at had tiny bedrooms.  The second one was out of our price range.

We finally checked out a different community that was still in the school district we want the kids to attend.  Immediately all of us loved the house but at this point we still had some other houses to look at.  The next day we spend most of the day looking at houses that were beautiful but we weren't getting the same vibe as we did before.  We went back to the house again to get a second look and we immediately felt like this was the right choice.  So we went in and signed the papers.  Our fabulous agent got the builder to throw in a whole bunch of extras too.  We didn't have enough time to have our home built from scratch so we opted for a home that was already in the process of being built.  It should be ready at the end of April.
 
So even though it was exhausting, we did it!  We have a home to move to now.

Thank goodness.  I am not a camper!