We bought a house!

In early January we found out from our landlords that we either needed to sign a new year long lease, or leave. With a fire ignited under our buns, we started madly looking for homes. We've been doing our research for a LONG time and knew that the inventory in Seattle was crazy low, that prices were ridiculously high, and that the competition to actually get a home was intense. With those fun little tidbits of knowledge dancing in our head, we began our hunt.

After several weeks of looking and not seeing anything I liked in our price range, the Monday after the Superbowl rolled around and the kids and I stumbled upon a house that for the first time I said "this could work". The problem - quite a bit further north than we wanted. The good's - brand new, beautiful kitchen; big open great room; move-in ready; fun projects we can do later to make it just how we want it; a great neighborhood and very nice neighbors; much closer to work than we were before in addition to being very close to Calvin's new and future school. And, did I mention it was at the lower end of our price range?! Fantastic. Everything was great but the location, and even that was doable.

So that night we put in an offer and the next day it was accepted. This is a bit unusual in this area. We had a divine combination of the sellers being in a hurry to sell, and a huge absence of house hunting due to the Seattle Superbowl hangover. Providence I think. So as things progressed, we quickly realized what a God-send the ease of this purchase was and are so excited for our first home!!!

Here is the front - not terribly impressive, but clean and lots of nice soil awaiting plants and flowers

And the big selling point - a brand new kitchen! The cabinets in this thing are AMAZING. Some have pull out shelves, some have built in spice storage, they are all deep and slow closing ... and cherry wood! Plus granite countertops, brand new stainless steel appliances, and an induction heat cooktop. AMAZING. The kitchen of my dreams.

An ENORMOUS island with storage cupboards ALL THE WAY AROUND. And new lights! Love these skylights as well. 

So ... our big plan is to paint the entire house (including this lovely blue wall ... yikes) a gray. Because gray is the new beige ;). 

LOVE these beautiful floors, tall ceilings, and the HUGE front windows. And, not sure if you can tell from the pictures, but this is all just one huge great room - living room, diving room, kitchen. So fantastic for the way we live and life at home with little ones. 

One of three upstairs bedrooms. Which means we now have a for-real guest room! For us, this was a huge luxury and something we were not expecting to get. Super thrilled about it and excited to be able to welcome guests! 

Dining room with a beautiful slider out to the back porch 

The upstairs bathroom. On the other side of the wall is a very nice, newish looking bathtub shower. So, this bathroom is fine but I HATE blue. A lot. So my plan here is to paint the walls gray, paint the semi-blueish countertop a dark slate, and make it a gray, white and yellow bathroom. Yay!

So ... think creatively. This is the downstairs "bonus" living room space. At first I thought, what a great place for the kids toys until my dear husband reminded me that we might put the kids down here, but they will always just be in the main living room. So why not make this beast of a room the master bedroom? Brilliant. So this is the long-term plan because the downstairs needs the most work and converting a floor into a master suite is a bit ... tricky. Try to see past the bad paint and the nasty curtains. Imagine it gray with our yellow bedding and some nice wood blinds ... plus we need to build a closet. Probably right where Mr. Picture-taker is standing to take this. 

Nice big windows for a basement room

This is the weirdest room in the house. It's the downstairs 3/4 bath that has, as you can kind of see in the mirror, a gross and small shower. And the red is wallpaper. Yuck. But the wanescoating is semi-nice. The odd thing is that to the right of the sink is a half-wall and a weird little space with the water heater ... and sticking out from the shower is a half-wall ... and the half-walls intersect in a way that makes walking into the bathroom feel a bit odd. So, at some point the hope is to knock out the two big walls, push the water heater back into the crawl space, and redo this bathroom and make it awesome.

Additionally, in between the downstairs bathroom and the soon-to-be-downstairs master bedroom is a quite large, unfinished laundry room (with frontloaders! Yay!). This room has lots of potential and is a pretty big space, but needs some work. 

The backyard is enormous. It's technically fully fenced, although the bushes and trees seem to provide a fence as well. There is also this HUGE slab of concrete that is just fantastic for the kids and a ROOF! So great for being able to play outside a bit on those rainy Seattle days. 

There you go - I hope you have enjoyed this little tour of our new home. Right now we're set to close on March 6. We will spend the bulk of March doing painting and other repairs before moving in toward the end of the month.

On another note, this coming June Matthew and I will have been married 10 years. In those 10 years we have lived in Spokane, Princeton, Pasadena, Amsterdam, Yakima, Chelan, and now Seattle. Seven places in 10 years. So for us this house has a lot of meaning. Permanance. Stability. Settling down. Saying hello to a new chapter in life ... one that I'm sure will be just as exciting, but hopefully involve a lot less moving boxes.

And that feels really, really good.