We moved!

I know this post is about a month overdue, but be patient. I've been busy.

Joe and I moved into OUR first house on June 22, 2008. We decided purchasing a house would be a lot less stressful if anyone in the industry didn't stand to gain from the buyer spending more money. Everyone gets a commission based on what you spend, so it's in all their best interest for you to buy quickly and spend more money. Joe and I definitely don't think that's fair to the buyer. We also learned not to trust anything anyone says, especially if they tell you they'll give you something but insist that you don't have to sign any paperwork. There's a whole novel I could write about this subject, but I won't to save space (and avoid giving anyone reading this a serious headache).

Here's a picture of the house.


It's two-stories, 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms. There are some definite things we're not really fond of, but this is by far the nicest place we've ever lived. In the tradition of Andrea's blog, I'm going to do a little flashback of the places Joe and I have lived since we got married.

#1 June '01-July '01: Logan, Utah. We started out in a one bedroom apartment just off campus (755 North 800 East for those who might know). It was so tiny! There wasn't even a door on our bedroom. Things weren't working out with our jobs, and Joe's boss in Orem begged him to come back and help out for a while, so we moved...

#2 July '01-Sept. '01: Orem, Utah. We didn't have an apartment on such short notice, so our friends, Brett and Jeni offered to let us sleep in the spare bedroom of their apartment until we found something. That lasted about 2.5 weeks until I got accepted into the nursing program in Logan. I had to commute for a week of that until we found..

#3 Sept. '01-Oct. '02: Logan, Utah (987 N. 150 W.). Our next apartment in Logan was in a little area dubbed "Little Tijuana" by our friends, Brandon and Darcy Burke, who also lived there. It was a dumpy 2-story townhouse, but it was home. We have some good memories of that place. That's where Peggy lived for a while when she was first going to Utah State. That's the house we brought AJ home from the hospital to, but it was tiny with a baby. We learned that some friends of ours were moving out of their super-nice house a few blocks away, so we moved...

#4 Oct. '02-Feb. '06: Logan, Utah (272 W. 775 N.). This is probably the best place next to our house now that we lived. It was the upstairs of a house. We had 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. The landlady was really kind of weird. She'd always blame us for things that went wrong. Like the water heater rusted out the bottom and water leaked into the carpet a little bit before we noticed it. I soaked up as much water as I could and called her. I'm not sure what she expected, but I think she really thought I'd been salting the bottom of it to make this happen or something. But it was cheap, and like I said, it was a really nice place to live. We definitely would have stayed there until Joe graduated except that the city of Logan found out that she was renting the house as a double-unit (her weird son lived downstairs from us). This is a big deal in Logan. She was either going to be fined big time or one of us had to go. She kicked her son out! However, she couldn't afford to keep the place as a single unit. In the interest of not worrying about having the house super-clean (with 2 kids at this point) all the time and having to move out on someone else's terms, we decided to move. In retrospect, she wanted WAY too much for the house, and we totally could have stayed there another year, but hindsight...

#5 Feb. '06-Dec. '06 Logan, Utah (506 W. 200 S.). We moved into the top floor of a super-old house that used to be a chiropractic clinic. It was a crazy house because people had just changed things over the years to adapt. The floorplan totally didn't make any sense and there were weird things like a century-old church bench built into the living room. The owners were a young couple downstairs (Jake and Brittney Nielson) who we got along with really well. It was so interesting though because people would always stop by and tell us stories about stuff that happened in the house (like how their cousin's niece's sister-in-law's twins were born on the bench). Joe graduated college that fall, and we got a job offer in Kansas, so we moved...

#6 Dec. '06-May '08 Lenexa, Kansas (10810 Noland Ct.). This was another dumpy townhouse, but it was what we could afford when we moved. We loved living in Kansas! We only had one real threat of tornado that fizzled very quickly in the time we lived there. I was a lot more scared by ice storms that left you without power for days and days than I was by tornados. We made a lot of really good friends in Kansas, and we miss them. And I (LeiAnn) miss the humidity! It never really bothered me, but living back in the dry air really does. I hate the extreme hots and cold throughout the day here. I swear I'm just cold all the time here. Not only that, but there's always stuff to do in the city. I miss just going shopping and finding any store or restaurant that I might want (except they didn't have a Gandolfo's. Oh, my heavens, that sounds so good right now, and I don't have one here either! Ugh! My life sucks!). Anyway, we did miss our family in Kansas, and Joe was not particularly fond of his job, so when his friend offered him a position in his home town, we decided to move again...

#7 May '08-June '08 Moses Lake, WA (4398 Rd. E.9 NE; AKA-Joe's mom's house). We stayed with Joe's parents until we could get into our house, which took WAY too long, by the way. It was nice to have someone fix meals periodically for us, but the lack of our own place/living out of suitcase really got to us after a while. It was a relief to sleep in my own bed after so long.

#8 June '08-present (1705 E. Pirate Lane). Some things I really like that I've never had before in this house are a completely fenced backyard, grass that's free of dog poop and/or glass shards, my own master bathroom, an attached garage, some permanence. What a relief to be at a point that we can finally put some roots down!!