We bought a house yesterday!!

This weekend,we went to an auction of foreclosed homes, where they sold over 200 homes in the Valley. We drove an hour each way and were there for five hours--with all five kids--on Saturday. What a wild experience it was! There were so many people there, and it was very *noisy*!!

We didn't plan to go for the second day, but we saw there were two homes in our area that we thought might go in our price range. So we zipped over after church yesterday to check it out.

Our hearts were pounding like crazy as Matt bid on this home. And our hands shook as we signed the papers afterwards. But we are really, really excited about it! :) We got an incredible price for this house, because it is a fixer-upper. It will take quite a bit of work to get it ready (replacing windows, screens, interior doors, cleaning carpets, painting, etc.), but much less than we had anticipated. We did see the outside of the house before we bought it, but not the inside, so we were pleasantly surprised when we saw that the "damage" inside wasn't as bad as we had anticipated.

Fun things about this house:

• It is only 1/3 mile from where we've been living since we moved here. We like this neighborhood a lot. :)
  
• A couple from our church lives around the corner.
• The back yard is bigger than where we are now, and has grassy areas (they are kind of looking dead, but grass seed will help that).
• The back yard only is bordered by one neighbor, since it backs up to a corner. (I like this, because where we are now, the kids need to use "inside voices" when they play outside, since we're so close to everyone else!).
• It's 95 square feet bigger than where we currently live.
• The house is on what I guess you'd call a "mini cul-de-sac", a "T" off the street that has six houses arranged around it. We've already met people from three of the houses on our "T", plus one across the street from us.
• The kids like that the neighborhood park has swings at it. The one close to the house we're in now has a play structure, but not swings.
• This house has an upstairs laundry room. Cool, huh? No traipsing up & down stairs with laundry. :)
  

Well, I guess that's about all for now. I'm sure that in the future this blog may appear to be all about the improvements we will be making to make it liveable for us. But we can't begin any of that until we close, which has to happen within 30 days. So you'll be hearing more about this later...