I haven’t posted in a while because I finally moved into my new house. There’s a bit of a backstory to this which I’ll share here briefly. Also, I’ll post some pictures at some point, but since this blog is likely to move to another server soon (and the galleries will likely be a pain to move), I’ll likely just wait until after the blog moves to post pics.

So, the house. WAAAAAY back in early 2004 my wife and I were looking for some land to buy which we’d eventually build on. That wasn’t working out so well, and having both of us working from home with a toddler was starting to get to be too much, so we changed tactics and thought we’d look for an interim, larger, house. Found one, put in an offer, went all the way to closing (gave the big check to the title agency and everything), but it fell through because the owner was a snake in the middle of a divorce and among other things took out some big loans on the house the week before it was to close and failed to convince his wife that she should sign the papers to sell the house. Somewhat disheartened, we started our search once more.

We ended up looking at some other houses that were very similar in design to the one that “got away” so that led us to look up that local builder to see what kind of lots they were building on in our area. After our first visit to a lot, we met up with Jon who works at the builder’s, and he let us know that his home wasn’t for sale, but that he was looking to sell it at some point and it was in our home town and had a similar design to what we were looking for. We followed him back to his house (he called his wife on the way and like a saint she said “sure, bring folks in to look at our house with 10 minutes notice… no problem!” (or something like that)). We saw the house, and the land it came with, and fell in love with it. We were determined to figure out a way to get the house, but there was one catch — Jon wanted to build himself a new house and didn’t want to move twice. That, combined with the fact that a week or so later I received orders activating me for duty in Iraq, meant that we would end up buying the house and renting it to Jon until I got back from Iraq and his house was completed. We closed on the house the day before I had to report to Ft Leonard Wood for military duty, in May 2004.

At the end of August 2005, Jon moved out and we started moving in. Our furniture moved in last weekend, and we’re down to just a few outdoor things that need to come out of the old house. We have a lot of unpacking left to do, but it feels really good to finally be done moving (we’ve been preparing to move for about 2 years now!).