Looking ahead to 2015

 

Although 2014 was a good year, there are definitely changes I’d like to make in 2015, starting with this blog.  As of right now I have a whooping 19 blog posts done for last year.  That bums me out big-time.  I use this blog as my online diary and we print books out at the end of each year and we’re hoping someday we’ll have an entire set of the books with the story of our lives in them to pass down to the kids.  I have so many pictures from last year that I haven’t even looked at, but I am starting to go through my photos and edit them and it is my goal to get all of those pictures, at least, up on the blog.  I’ll write as much as I remember about the days I took them, but at least the pictures are better than nothing.  And then I hope to keep up on it much better this year, although with having a job and adding another kid to the mix and possibly moving God knows where, that might be tough.  But I’m going to attempt it anyway.  I’m bound and determined to get last year caught up too, but I’m going to be back-dating all of my posts so they probably won’t show up in your feeds.  If you want me to email them to you, let me know and I’ll add you to the list!

Speaking of the blog and all my photos and editing, that’s another thing I’d like to work on.  I really want to improve in my photography, including the actual picture taking and figuring out my camera more and then editing in Lightroom.  This blog was a lot easier to keep up with when I didn’t know much about photography and didn’t edit any of the photos.  It adds significantly more time to the blogging process when I want to edit the photos before I put them on here.  This year I would LOVE to upgrade my camera to a full frame (preferably the 5D Mark iii), but considering that camera is about $2500 I’m not sure that’s going to happen.  Although, when we had Abbie, we got my first DSLR, the XSi, and shortly after we had Ben we upgraded to the 60D, so it would just be keeping up with tradition if I upgraded again with baby #3.  I love the 60D but I take a lot of photos inside and I have to bump the ISO up SO much to be able to have the shutter speed above 1/120, which I need considering I’m shooting kids or dogs (aka – moving targets).  But if the ISO is above like 800 the photos have a ton of noise in them and that bugs the hell out of me.  (See below for examples.)  I still get decent pictures, but I like crisp, clean shots and these are far from it.  

I also would love to work on de-cluttering my house.  I am the queen of holding on to things I don’t really need to keep because I always think of the what-if’s.  But let’s face it, I’m not ever going to be the size I was in high school anymore and having some of those clothes is more depressing than motivating at this point so I could probably unload them.  We have so much stuff that we don’t use that I should just get rid of.  And my main motivation is our potential move this summer.  We were close to our weight limit when we moved from Italy to here and since then we’ve purchased another kitchen table (and I’m using the old one as one of my sewing tables), a solid oak antique desk for Abbie, a huge 3 piece sectional couch and lots of other little things that add up in weight.  I can almost guarantee wherever we go next we won’t be living in a 3100+ sq foot house and we’re not going to have room for all our stuff so we might as well downsize now.  I’m hoping I can put some things in my parents basement/shed for a while until Mark is out of the military and we’re not moving every 1-3 years.  This will be a tough one for me, but I’m going to try!

I would also love to be more active this year.  Right now it’s a little tough with being pregnant and all, but after I have this baby, I would like to be more active.  I have dreams that I can actually run for any real amount of time.  I have never been good at running and I have never enjoyed it.  If I could get to the point where I could actually jog a mile without stopping and without feeling like my lungs are going to explode or collapse or both, I would consider that a win.  I’d love to someday do a 5K, but that is a long way in the future.  I have pretty much zero endurance and I would like to build that up by walking/jogging and maybe swimming.  This will probably be the hardest of all my goals because I tend to not make time to exercise and I can only imagine that might get more difficult with 3 kids.

I would also like to have more patience with my kids and really work on the way I talk to them and handle them when I’m tired/stressed/busy/etc.  My kids tend to get the brunt of my pissy-ness and I hate that.  I want to learn to take a step back when I feel tension building and then handle the situation and my emotions the way I would like my kids to handle them.  They are little sponges right now and I really want to be the best example to them of how we should act and how to be kind and if I’m flipping my lid, I can’t expect them not to.  I’ve been reading articles regarding the way you talk to kids and how it affects them and I’m much more aware of what I’m saying now or how I’m coming across to my kids.  I’ve already noticed I’ve been able to hold back a few times and not flip out on them.  I’m far from the perfect parent, and I never will be perfect, but my goal is to become better and to bring myself up to a level I’m comfortable with and I’m not there yet.

Last but not least, I love buying fabric.  I have a pretty healthy stash of fabric, but I never DO anything with it.  I have lots of plans for it, but actually sitting down and sewing something doesn’t ever happen.  I don’t make it a priority so it just doesn’t happen.  I love making things though and I love giving homemade gifts so I’m hoping to use at least some of my stash this year.  I haven’t even made my own kids quilts yet so if I could make them their own full sized quilts I would be happy with that.  And I think I’ve decided I’m going to pay someone else to quilt them for me since that part really stresses me out and trying to get a full sized quilt through my little machine sounds like hell.  I love piecing the tops together so I figure if I can at least get 3 tops done and then pay someone else to do the hard part it’s a win/win.  I get to use some of my stash and don’t have to do my least favorite part of quilting.

Lofty goals for 2015, but I’m really looking forward to this year!  Big changes are going to happen for us as a family and looking forward to seeing what’s in store for us and meeting our newest addition!

PS:  All of these pictures were taken Jan-March of 2014…  Better late than never.

Phoenix house fiasco/ blessing

Househunting

Feb 1, 2012

So apparently house hunting doesn't go nearly as easily as they make it seem on HGTV.  It's not where you look at a few houses and do a few hours of negotiation where the realtor runs back and forth while you nervously try to eat a meal and you seal the deal in what seems to be a few hours.  No, that's not how it goes at all.

Here's how it really goes.  First you spend 60000 credit card points and $1100 to fly 8 time zones away to try to find a house before you move so you don't have to live in a temporary apartment or hotel room with 2 young kids and 2 dogs for a month or two while you wait for closing.  Then you spend 2-3 days looking at houses, being completely overwhelmed and having every single house you look at run together to the point where you can't differentiate one from the other later on when you're trying to discuss them all despite you haven't taken decent notes on most of them.   Then you make an offer on a house that you love and tell them you'd love to have the deal sealed before you leave the country the next day.  They don't even come anywhere close to meeting the timeline you requested and instead make a counter offer about 2 hours before you leave the state.  And on top of that, they counter back with them dropping the price by $1000.  On a $315K list price, they "negotiate" by dropping it $1k, cut the closing costs that they'll pay in half and move the closing date back over 2 weeks.  They also say that basically they want to not discuss anything more until after the weekend, which is 3 days after we get back to Italy.

We are really frustrated with their counter.  We thought our offer was reasonable based on the comps in the area and the market.  Obviously we left a little negotiating room, but we thought it was a decent offer.  It seems like they paid more for that house a year ago than most of the other houses that sold in that area a year ago, so I can see how they want to get more money from the house than what they paid, and what they're trying to do by pricing it at $315k is have them still make money after all the closing costs and other expenses are paid.  We get that, but we're not going to set ourselves up for losing money when we want to sell it later on down the road because we overpaid for it and we don't want to pay more than the house is worth.  The fact that they're being so unreasonable is really discouraging and makes us feel like they don't really want to sell the house, even though we know they're moving out of the state in early April.  At this point I think it's smartest for us to play their game.  We're going to wait until Monday to make a counter offer and we're going to lay our cards on the table and see where that gets us.

__________

So we didn't have to wait until Monday.  Early Saturday morning (Italy time) they rescinded their offer and said they were going to entertain other offers at this time.  So we gave up on that house.  I'm not exactly heart broken, because I still think it was too much house for us for our first house.  I don't want to be house poor and while we could have made it work, we would have been sacrificing in other areas.  We stressed for a while about our situation.  I was ready to call off buying a house and wanted to consider renting for our time in Phoenix but Mark was pretty adamant about not renting.  We started to look at other houses in the area that we hadn't seen and then started looking back at ones that we had seen.  Since it was really important that we had the master and 3 bedrooms upstairs for us, we narrowed our houses down to the area that we liked and that had the layout we liked, which left us with 2.  One was the first house we saw.  I liked that house as far as the layout and how bright it was, but Mark was pretty much dead set against it.  It needed new carpet and paint and the yard needed a lot of work and the yard and pool were both tiny.  He didn't like the neighborhood as much, which was odd since it was about a block away from the Mulberry house that he really liked.  So that one was out.  Which lead us to look at the only other house that had the layout we wanted.

When we looked at this house, there were a few things we liked about it and a few things we didn't like about it.  The pool and yard is the second best we saw behind the Glenrosa house.  It's in a nice gated community and it's on a corner lot, so it has a good sized pool and yard, with mature landscaping and grass and even a raise garden area for me.  There is a small park that we can see from our back yard, which is a huge plus for us and it's in a good school district.  It had double ovens and a gas stove, which were big on my list, and then Glenrosa house didn't even have those.  However, it seemed really dark in the house and that was a huge deterrant for me.  I like bright open houses and this didn't feel like that at all.  They had black window treatments though and the blinds were all down, so that didn't help.  My biggest dislike of this house was that the entire upstairs was tiled.  All of the bedrooms had tile and I am not a big fan of tile at all, especially in bedrooms.  So that will be something we'll change right away.  We're going to carpet the upstairs, although I think it's going to be pretty darn expensive since it'll be around 1500 sq ft.  And I'm still not sure if we want to try to rip out all the tile or just put carpet down over the tile…  We'll have to see.  We want to upgrade the appliances in the kitchen, although the house includes all of them, plus the washer and dryer and a built in grill in the back yard, so that won't be a priority for us right now.  We'll probably put in a tile backsplash and also updated the light fixtures through out the house, and update the master bathroom a little too.  It has a 3 car garage so Mark will have room to make a woodworking shop, and that was probably more of a priority for me than it was for him since I really want him to have the opportunity to pursue this hobby.  I'm sure he'd be great at it.

So Saturday we decided to make an offer on this house.  It was originally listed at $289,900 and they had dropped the price to $269,900.  We decided to offer $258k with them paying 2% closing costs.  After the first fiasco with making an offer on the Glenrosa house, we were really hesitant to low-ball them on the price.  To our surprise, the sellers accepted our offer as is.  We couldn't believe it!  We also found out that they are an older couple and he is retired military and a retired cop.

We're excited about our new adventure.  We went from wanting a completely done house without any opportunity for us to upgrade it, to buying a house that we will be able to customize to our liking and hopefully being able to earn some equity in it also.  I'm just glad that we have a place to go when we get to AZ instead of having to move in to a temporary apartment while we start the house hunt over.  The whole situation with the first house really was a blessing in disguise.   I don't have any pictures of our house, but if you'd like to see the listing for it, email me and I'll send you the link!

Our Phoenix house hunting trip

We are on our way back from our house hunting trip in Phoenix.  It's kind of been the trip from hell - not at all what we were expecting - and we're glad to be on our way home.

Sunday morning we looked at 7 houses, I think.  We saw a few that we thought were decent houses, but none of them had exactly what we were looking for.  We liked one on Mulberry Street quite a bit, but the master bedroom was downstairs and the kids bedrooms were all upstairs.  It also had this casita thing, which was like another room, but separate from the house, so we couldn't have really used it as a guest room since you had to walk outside to get in to the house, and it didn't have a bathroom.  If it had had a bathroom, it would have been a lot better, but I still didn't like the fact that the we would have been on a separate floor from our young kids.  It was a nice house, but the paint was all pretty dark and it didn't let a lot of sunlight in on the main floor, so it was a little bit cave-ish.  Mark really liked it, but I was never sold on it.

On Monday we looked at a BUNCH more houses.  I'm not sure how many we saw, but it was between 10-15.  The first one we looked at was great, except that it had the master and 2 other bedrooms upstairs and then a 3rd bedroom downstairs, and that just won't work for us.  It also had solar panels that were owned outright and have the house a net electric bill of zero for the entire year, which is a HUGE savings in Phoenix were your electric bills are easily $300-400 during the summer months.  We liked that house, but it just wouldn't work for us.

The second one we looked at was on Glenrosa and we LOVED that house.  We walked in and it immediately felt like home.  It had EVERYTHING we wanted in a house (with the exception of a gas stove and double ovens - but those were more on my dream list than anything else).  It had the master bedroom and 3 other bedrooms upstairs, plus a small loft area right by the stairs that would be perfect to put a desk and also a GREAT playroom with french doors with nice blinds on them right next to the loft.  So the kids could be in there playing and I could be working on the computer right outside the playroom.  The playroom is actually kind of two rooms, and there is a connecting jack and jill bathroom to the playroom and what would be Abbie's room.  Abbie's room had a small walk in closet and so did Ben's, which was right next door.  Ben's room shared another jack and jill bathroom with the 3rd bedroom upstairs, that would eventually be baby #3's, which is right next to the master.  There's a huge linen closet in the hall, and then we have a huge master suite, with dual walk-in closets, dual vanities (one even had a sitting place for me to put on my make-up) separated by a large soaking tub and a separate little room for the toilet.  The shower had two shower heads and a large seat in it and the master bedroom is big enough to have a sitting area and a bedroom part.  We also liked that our room was closest to the stairs, so you'd have to go by our bedroom to access any other parts of the upstairs.  The downstairs of the Glenrosa house had a good sized guest room with it's own bathroom, that was away from the rest of the house, which I prefer.  It had another bathroom with just a toilet off the main entry.  It has a formal living room with a fireplace and lots of windows, next to a court yard area that are accessible by double doors from the hallway, next to the large family room that has large windows on both sides looking out to the courtyard and the back yard.  The LARGE kitchen has beautiful granite counter tops, with a very large island and nice cabinets, and it's right next to a breakfast nook area where we could put our kitchen table.  There's a walk through butlers pantry to the large dining room that our new table would look great in, and that is directly across the hallway from the court yard area.  I would say the size of the family room/kitchen/breakfast nook at that house is about the same size, space wise, as our entire kitchen/dining room/living room/ both kids bedrooms and downstairs bathroom plus more at our current house.  And then there's the back yard.  It has an amazing covered patio with a built-in grill that we could expand on to turn in to an outdoor kitchen later on down the road if we want.  We could put ceiling fans out there also and speakers since the hook ups are already there.  The backyard was at least 3-4 times bigger than most of the other ones we saw, if not more, and the pool is gorgeous and deep enough on one end to dive in, but shallow enough on the other end for a "Benj area" as we were calling them.  They're like little built up areas where you can put an umbrella in the pool and the water is less than a foot deep so you can lounge in the water or put babies there to splash around also.  It also had a 3 car garage with one stall being separate and the perfect place for Mark's work shop.  Obviously, we are in love with this house.  The huge downsize is that it's listed for $315k, which is $15k over our budget and it's in a newer area so the taxes are about twice what they were in other areas.  But on the flip side, there is a park literally 3 houses down, and the high rated elementary school is about a half mile away and Mark's work would be about 10 minutes away.

We saw a bunch of houses after that on Monday and none of them even came anywhere close to the Glenrosa house.  We basically had our #1 house picked out, and then the Mulberry house was about #5 and everything else we saw was #10+.  In other words, there was a HUGE gap between our #1 house and our #2 house.  We saw some nice houses and some houses that would have been great if we'd wanted to put a ton of work in to them, and some very nice houses that were 30 minutes from base, and that's just not what we wanted.  We looked at about 7-8 houses up in the Surprise area and while Surprise is a nice area with decent parks, it just didn't appeal to use nearly as much as the Litchfield Park/ Goodyear area.  Monday we went home knowing that the Glenrosa house was what we wanted, but we just weren't sure we could afford it because we'd talked to a lender and he gave us a quote for the monthly payment to be over $1800, which was well over our $1650 limit we had set.  We were discouraged and stressed out and went to Red Lobster for dinner to discuss it all with my parents and try to figure things out.

While we were at Red Lobster, Mark was looking at CNN and saw a news flash that a pilot from Aviano had gone down in the Adriatic and we both immediately started trying to contact friends back home through email and Facebook and by the end of the meal, we had found out it was our good friend, Luc Gruenther, that had gone down.  For obvious reasons we were devastated and worried sick and all of a sudden the house situation was the least of our concerns.  For the rest of our trip, we were constantly checking FB and our emails for updates from friends back home, trying to figure out more information on if Luc had been found and on how his wife, Cassy, was doing.  We would fall asleep looking for updates, waking up in the middle of the night and check numerous times for updates and then check first thing in the morning for updates.  It was horrible.

Tuesday we went back to the Glenrosa and Mulberry houses to look at them both again, and confirmed that we did still love the Glenrosa house.  We also went and saw a few more houses and tried to look at some model homes, but they weren't open.  We looked at a house on Windward Ave that was a decent house and we decided that house was second on our list, but it still was ranked about #4 compared to our #1.  Tuesday night we made an offer on the Glenrosa house, but as of right now (Thursday at noon) we still haven't heard anything back.  We know that they're moving because of a relocation of his job, and that they've only lived in the house for a year.  There were appraisers there both days we saw the house doing appraisals for the relocation company and we think that's why we haven't heard anything back from them yet because they're waiting for the appraisals to come back.  We offered them $292k after looking at the comps in the area and knowing that they only paid around $296k for it when they bought it.

Wednesday we just hung out in the Arrowhead area and shopped a bit for baby showers coming up and we heard news that Luc's helmet and parachute had been found, which gave us great hope that he was still alive.  About an hour after we'd received that news, I got a call from Brittney (who was watching our kids) saying that Abbie had tried to pick Ben up and dropped him face first on to the tile, which knocked both of his front teeth out.  Great.  So then it was the mad scramble to try to figure out what we needed to do for him and Brittney was calling the nurse line, and I was trying to get ahold of my dentist friend in Italy to see what she should do.  Brittney ended up having to take him to the Pordenone Hospital because the base dentist wanted a chest x-ray to see where the missing tooth was.  (Brittney found one tooth, he swallowed the other one.)  They ended up not giving him x-rays because they listened to his lungs and he sounded fine.  His mouth was still bleeding, but other than that and a huge lip, he was back to his normal happy self.    She ended up taking him to the pediatric dentist on base on Thursday (Italy time) and they x-rayed his mouth to determine if any thing was broken or if there were any parts of the teeth left in there, and there weren't.  The ped. dentist and his pediatrician also wanted a chest x-ray done just to make sure that the tooth wasn't in his lungs somewhere, and it's not.  Ben was a champ laying there during the x-ray also.

Today we got up early to leave Phoenix and still hadn't heard anything about the house.  Ben is doing well though, so that's a relief.  However, right before we boarded this flight, we got the news that they found Luc body and that he didn't make it.  We are absolutely heartbroken to have lost this amazing man in our lives, and even more heartbroken for my good friend Cassy, who is due with their first child in a few weeks.  We feel so helpless being an ocean away from everything going on at home and are ready to be back to be with our kids and our friends.  I'm going to call our realtor during our layover and hopefully she'll have a counter offer from the sellers by that point.  Not holding my breath though...