Our House

 We got the keys!!!

Now that the house is officially ours here's a tour...





Our house is a split level. Meaning when you walk in the front door you can either go up half a flight of stairs to get to the main level, or go down half a flight of stairs to the spare bedroom, laundry room area.

At the top of the stairs on the main level is our living room. Those two doors go out onto our deck in our back yard. If you turn right while standing in the living room you'll see the kitchen.

There are a lot of pictures of the kitchen because it is my favorite thing about the house. I love the peninsula, and the fact that we get two pantries. The white door in this picture is a typical sized pantry, and the previous owners added the cabinets between that door and the fridge.

All the appliances came with the house, which is a huge blessing. We have an amazing fridge with double doors and a slide out freezer. Also the stove top and microwave are new and super nice as well.

I love the back-splash in the kitchen it really makes it look finished.












This one of the two "kid's rooms". It's a pretty typical bedroom with a nice window and closet.

This is the second of the two "kid's rooms". It's almost identical to the first except that it's painted blue.

 This is the main level bathroom, it's pretty typical.














 This is the Master bedroom, it's hard to tell in this picture but the walls are painted brown and there is a darker brown accent wall.

This is the Master Bath. Again it's hard to tell in this picture, but it has a double vanity, and two really cute oval mirrors above the sink.

 Here's our walk-in-closet which both Brian and I are super excited for because that means he'll have room for his clothes in the closet too!

Down stairs is where the spare bedroom and third bathroom are as well as the garage and a storage/laundry room. Here is the laundry room with the washer dryer the sellers left for us.

 In the laundry room/storage room is a second fridge that the sellers left for us as well as some shelves for storage.

This is the spare bedroom which we'll use as a playroom/guest room. It's really nice since it is almost as large as the master bedroom and has it's own bathroom and walk-in-closet as well.
















 Here's the walk-in-closet in the spare room.

 Here's the bathroom attached to the spare room.














One of Brian's favorite parts about the house is the over sized two car garage. I like it because I could park two cars in it and Brian would still have a lot of space in the back of the garage to use as a work shop space.

Brian's other favorite thing about the house is the back yard.We have almost .4 acres with a deck a nice retaining wall and lots of side yard space.

Our backyard line goes just passes where Brian is standing in this picture. Basically right up to the neighbors shed.

We are so excited to have the house be officially ours so we can start planning our next adventures; like getting a puppy, and preparing the nursery for the future little Marler.

The House Hunt

We are so excited about our future new house, but it took a lot of searching to find our perfect home.

The house hunt started long before Brian and I ever got to Virginia. As soon as we had decided to accept the offer from Celanese to have Brian be a Reliability Engineer in their Virginia location, we started looking at the housing market. We did research on housing websites, looked at our financial info and did a lot of in depth budgeting to see what we could afford and when. We then came up with a list of about 25 houses that we ranked in an excel spreadsheet that we definitely wanted to see in person.

So with our list we headed out to Virginia two weeks before Brian had to start work. We were able to see our top 15 on the list in the first three days of being out there and we agreed our number one choice seemed perfect for us. The only problem was another family also thought it was perfect for them and they were preparing to make an offer. We made our offer Wednesday afternoon, confident that ours was better that the other family who put their offer in the night before. We got a call from our Realtor that night that the seller countered the other family's offer and the other family accepted. Our Realtor was able to find out that our offer was better, but the seller wanted to counter the people who put their offer in first.

It was hard news to hear, and even though we knew there was another family wanting the house, and we tried not to get our hopes up; we were still pretty sad and could hardly think about going out and looking at houses again.

After a good nights sleep we got right back on the horse and started looking at houses that we hadn't had on our excel list, but that our Realtor knew that we would like. We found three houses that we liked, though none were as good as the house we lost. We did a lot of research on the three houses, weighed out pros and cons and were having a hard time making any decision. One was so charming and had a ton of square footage, but it was older and had problems that come with an old home. One was new and had everything we wanted except for an extremely tiny backyard, and we'd have to negotiate the price down to get it into our price range. And the last one was newer and had a great view, but it needed a lot of work to get the number of beds and baths we wanted and a usable backyard. We weren't in love with any of them.

Tuesday the next week our Realtor called us up and said there was a new house that another Realtor in his company is selling. It wasn't technically on the market yet, but he and the other Realtors of his company got a tour and he thought it'd be perfect for us. We were the first ones to see it that Wednesday morning and after we walked though it we felt great about it. We split for lunch and then that Wednesday afternoon made an offer. Again we tried not to get too excited, and when our Realtor called that evening I tried to brace myself for whatever he had to say.

When he said they accepted our offer, I started jumping around the apartment. We are so happy to have found a house that we like better than the house we lost, in a fantastic neighborhood, with all the beds and baths we wanted, and a great size backyard. So far we've had the home inspection and have given financial documents to the bank and are on track to close and officially own the house on September 13th.