House Hunting

Is OVER! We found a lovely townhouse in a beautiful city. It's one of those you can tell they spent a lot of time and money planning it out. And we are so excited! We're under contract and if all goes well, in just over a month we'll be moving into our new home! A place we feel confident we can start our family. Amazing schools, lots of parks and green space. My best friend says it's where she and her hubby go for their date nights. New shopping centers, movie theater and they even opened a Cold Stone Creamery! We've seen a few dozen places and only a few felt like we could make it home. Only two of them felt like we could raise a family without leaving once the kids were school aged. I know the school rating system isn't perfect and even the best schools have problems but when the school is ranked 1 or 2 out of 10 - it doesn't make me want to send our future kids there! One we found was perfect - in fact it hit our entire "wish list", right down to the back yard not facing a bunch of other homes! We left and our agent contacted the seller agent only to be told it had been rented the day before - Super sad face. After seeing this place and the neighborhood, we looked around the area more and saw how nice it is. It's a older community. Many homes have been occupied well over 20 years. There are many subdivisions of single family homes, and townhomes/condos where the houses are on the market for less than a week before they go under contract. So we decided to keep looking and found a place that hits almost all of our "wish list". There's not a 2nd full bathroom, and there isn't a basement space for the "man-cave". But it does have 3 very large bedrooms with tons of closet space, a huge living room, and spacious dining room off the newly renovated kitchen. 1st floor laundry room - which I thought would suck but my sister (who has 2 little ones) has convinced me that with little kids it's really great to have not have the machines on the bedroom level. And a good sized deck off the kitchen. Which is good and bad - good cause it's already there, bad because it takes up the entire backyard.
 And we've talked about it and until we absolutely need the 3rd bedroom, it will be a make a suitable office/man cave. I imagine he's already picked out the perfect television. I already know the colors will be Cowboy blue, silver, and white :-). We think this is the perfect "starter house". It's less than 20 minutes to our closest friends, the commute to work for both of us will be much shorter, and we're closer about 30 min from D.C. if we drive, and there's a Metro like 10 minutes from the house! Much better than the 30 minutes to the metro we have now. If you can't tell - I'm beyond excited! I am kind of trying not to get my hopes up (it's not really working...) but this isn't a short sale like the last one so...prayers up that all goes well!!

Up next are inspections! This is quite the process!  It's late - and my soup is just about ready to be blended so - Happy Friday people!!