Ch-Ch-Changes and the not...

The past couple of weeks have been a whirl wind!  We've been working on the house and looking for a new place to live.  We've been battling illnesses of both the stomach and head variety, and my brother stayed with us for a weekend.

The house hunt


The reason we were looking to move was due to the fact that the slab our house is on has a huge crack down the middle.  This causes major cracks in the walls when the house moves or settles.  It also allows for the massive spider problems we had last spring, summer, and fall.  The latest problem is that the man who lived here before us, didn't do a very good job of cleaning the gutters causing rot and drainage issues and with all the snow we had gotten, it was causing the overhang to almost fall completely off the house.
We've looked at 3 different places.  Maybe I'm too picky, but I don't think any of them fit our family.

• The first was an apartment type place in an old, renovated grocery store from the early 1900s.  It was my favorite place we looked, and I'm kind of sad it wouldn't work.  It had 4 bedrooms but the bedrooms were all way to small.  We don't need huge bedrooms, but we need to be able to fit beds and dressers in bedrooms and I don't think it was possible to fit our bed in any of the rooms.
• The second place was a 3 bedroom duplex.  It had great potential although it was a tiny bit higher in price than what we were wanting to pay monthly but still doable.  The bedrooms were huge and it had 2 bathrooms.  The major problem with it was that the woman living there currently, as the landlord put it "has a lot of stuff."  She's obviously a hoarder and doesn't take care of her house.  Since we were supposed to be moving in April 1st, we were a little worried about how the house would look when we were to move in.  When we left, my skin was crawling.  My house may not be the cleanest but wow.  At least I try.
• The third place was another 3 bedroom duplex with only one bathroom.  It was really neat with a dining room, but the house needed work.  One of the bedroom doors appeared to have been kicked in at one time, and some of the cabinets in the kitchen were rotting, and by rotting I mean had holes in the doors.  We are renting, not buying, so it's not really something we'd even be able to fix.  

This whole thing has been kind of frustrating, so after some talking, news from our landlord and some work being done to our current house, we've decided to stay.  We like the landlord, love the location, hate the actual act of moving, and I can't speak for Shawn, but I do like the house and yard.  We're going to make it a little more homey and use the house to it's full potential.  I'm so excited!

The work on the house

• I mentioned the overhang on our house falling off... well, we talked to the landlord and he's had some men come out and fix it.  They pulled it all down and started from scratch.  We're still waiting on them to get the gutter up, but it looks amazing.
• We've decided to spray outside for spiders and get new spider traps for inside the house.
• We are putting up more stuff on the walls.  I'm finally printing some of my photos (both family and nature photos) out and hanging them around the house.  We're also looking for things for bedroom walls.
• We got a new bed and bedding for the adult bed.  It's no secret that we co-slept with our kids and in my opinion for far too long.  I was ready to get my bed back.  Ben has been sleeping on a crib mattress on our bedroom floor since the week before Christmas in preparation for the big move to his own room.  We decided that the kids might take to it better if we put them in the same room.  Last weekend, we put together Sydney's crib, bought Ben and big boy bed, bought them both really cool bedding and a TV.  I'm still working on finding things for their walls but it's looking amazing and the kids have slept in it pretty well.  Ben even loves playing in their so much.  Getting him to come out to eat or be with the rest of the family is like pulling teeth, which is unexpected to me...  I didn't expect this type of behavior from him for another several years.
• Our Bedroom

• The Kid's Bedroom

• We ditched the blue rug we had on top of our carpet in the living room.  It was falling apart and when laid on, it was kind of itchy.  We also got rid of the big, 60 inch TV from the 90s, and replaced it with a more manageable TV that doesn't take up so much space.
• Before

• After

• Now we have to clean out the closet and finish sorting and correctly storing our belongings in totes in the garage and then this will be like an entirely new house.  I'm so excited, I'm already planning what to put in the flowerbed out front.

Things have been quite busy and exciting here.  Now if everyone can get healthy and STAY healthy, and if the weather would hurry up and warm up (for good) that would be wonderful.  On the bright side, it was warm enough for us to make it to the park Thursday evening.  The first park trip of the year and we had a blast.