Yes we are moving.

I know I have alluded to this many times, but never had a whole post to explain the rhyme or the reason.. so here it goes.
A few months ago I went with a friend to look at a house in our neighborhood that had just been reduced 30K overnight for them to buy. I really liked it too mainly because it was a screaming deal. I came home talked to Dan and we decided maybe we should invest in another house while the market was so low. So the searching began. in just two days we found a house in a very nice neighborhood that had been foreclosed and unoccupied for over a year. ) The day we found it it had just been reduced again, we went and looks and saw the potential. a big house, beautiful subdivision, and few years ago sold for double the current asking price. so we bought it. ( not without a fight though. there were 4 offers all together and we had a silent bidding war, it was too intense for my taste, we had no idea what the other people offered, the bank just said there are multiple offers please submit your best offer available!!! and we won!!! That is how I think of it, Dan says no we just offered the most money, the bank actually won! SO the plan was we would rent it out and live in our current house and one day we could move in there if we wanted to..

The day we finally closed the irrigation was turned off. there was no lawn and no now way to get one and keep it alive without any water and that would not happen again until next spring. who would come live in this nice neighborhood, paying lots of rent with a huge yard of dead weeds. probably no one!
That wasn't a deal breaker though, dan worked on this house so much, lots of little repairs and finishing work needed to be done. the walls were an ugly yellowy white so we would paint... long story short we put in tons of time fixing it and for what renters to bang it all up again? so we decided to move there and keep fixing stuff while we live there and rent out our current home since it was ready to rent and bring in money now. It was not the original plan, but it is good too. I am excited to move, but I really love my house now and my neighborhood and my ward here, but things kept falling into place there so maybe there is some reason or someone there that needs us there... who knows.

So we placed our house for rent, for way more than it was worth. Maybe we would get lucky and if not it bought us some time to finish stuff over there before we moved in. We were about ready so we lowered the rent a little and we had a few takers and one was serious and he wanted to move in 8 days later. So we move on Friday, they move in Saturday. My week has been in kind of a whirl wind since then (except for now of course I am sitting here blogging, I needed a break ;)
Dan and his "crew" are painting like mad men to finish in time, carpets being cleaned, house being cleaned and this house being packed and cleaned, a lot to do, but I work much better under pressure, I think we can get it all done in time. I will include some pictures too. like I said we bought the house because we saw the potential, it is a work in progress, but we really like it so far, it will be a place our family can GROW into. (assuming we have more kids... :) no that was not an announcement, please Bella isn't even crawling yet.. but she is close... and so cute, but you already knew that huh!
5 bedrooms, 3 baths almost 4,000sq ft.
these are the original MLS pics.

before the yard was dead.


master shower

living room

great room


Master

Bonus

Kitchen, don't worry one of the first things we did was paint that faux red wall, what were they thinking???