We expanded our search to three school districts instead of solely our current school district in the hopes of having a better chance at finding an existing home. Time was running out, homes we were seeing were hopeless, and we were quickly running out of options. We met again with a home builder we had met with last summer. We wanted to price out the home and see if building was an option. A double move was pretty much a given at that point anyway. They made us an offer we couldn't refuse. We went into contract on a new build and the next day applied to a new apartment community for a six month lease. In the weeks that followed we feverishly sorted, packed, cleaned, and prepared ourselves to move out of the home we'd grown in and out of over the last eight years.
No one prepares you for the roller coaster that is moving out of a home. I remember when Brandon and I first bought our house how excited we were and we just couldn't wait to move in. We were ready to move out of our apartment. We were ready to move on. Sure, it was the apartment we lived in after we were married. It was the place we brought home our first pet. By we, I mean me. I'm certain Brandon would want it clarified that it wasn't his choice to bring Stormy home. I digress. We had some great memories there. I just don't recall moving out being so emotional.
Perhaps because I wasn't quite ready to move on this time around. Perhaps because we brought our children home from the hospital to this house. Perhaps because this home held vastly more memories in eight years than our apartment did over the relatively short time we lived there. Maybe because this move involved uprooting two children from the only place they've ever known. Possibly because going on this venture as a sleep deprived third shifter was daunting. Whatever the reasons, this move was loaded with emotion.
We moved out of what was once our home, but now belongs to someone else, into a 933 square foot two bedroom apartment while we wait for our new home to be built. The vast majority of our belongings are spread amongst two rented garages and a POD. The rest of the necessities are in our apartment. After we cleaned the house and completed the yard work we went back before closing to say goodbye. We took a walk around and shared our memories of each space. We tried to drink it all in one last time.
We took a last photo of the kids out in front of the house. I wanted to put them next to the day lilies that I had once brought home from 920 before Nana sold it. They were only a few bunches at the time I brought them home but my how they grew!
We had to take a last selfie in front of the house. We've been taking selfies for almost 11 years. We took selfies before selfies were cool!
Brandon and his dad continued the rock wall all the way around the sidewalk back in 2007. They worked hard out in the hot sun on the project and it turned out beautifully.
Another time Brandon and his dad rebuilt the garden. When we moved in it was full of thistle and surrounded by rotting railroad ties. If I recall correctly, Brandon's mom helped pull out all of the thistle and weeds during one of her visits. Brandon and his dad put up the new fencing later. We planted some wonderful gardens. The soil was almost magical the way the plants grew with bounty. As the kids got older they were able to help pull weeds, which they shockingly enjoyed, and harvest our delicious veggies.
We watched many birds use this feeder over the years. We had so many cardinals and blue jays. I loved seeing the birds come around in winter because it made me feel better about the long Ohio winters.
We used to have three of these Bradford Pear Trees. You may recall a certain derecho a few years ago that caused the middle one to fall into the neighbor's yard leaving us with two pear trees. They were always beautiful with their white blossoms in the spring. I called them "The Three Amigos."
Our family enjoyed many meals, gatherings, and fun afternoons on this deck and in the backyard. I have taken countless photos of the kids sitting in this exact spot on sunny afternoons while blowing bubbles.
Who on earth takes a photo of an a/c unit? This family, that's who. In July of 2008 our old a/c ended its life with an exploded compressor. It had been running on its last legs. We were desperate and called whatever company it was that we thought of first. This company has one of those jingles that sticks in your head. They sold us this monstrous a/c and of course the furnace to go with it. We had to have this thing repaired so many times! Turned out that the year we replaced our unit, the company received a bad batch of coils resulting in a host of issues. We are glad to be free of it, of course now it seems to be at the point where it's all been repaired and replaced under warranty and sailing right along working fine.
In all the years we lived in this house, we never once used the fireplace. I always wished we'd used the fireplace. We never had it cleaned after moving in and Brandon hated to burn it so close to where the TV used to sit.
This living room is where we spent hours playing, watching movies, relaxing, napping on the couch. It's where both of the kids first crawled and walked. Gavin was quite motivated by his Easter basket one year to get him crawling. He was also a fan of crawling for the TV remote. No surprise there. Abby took those early steps back and forth to Brandon and me across the living room floor.
Abby flipped backwards off the kiddie picnic table in this room. That's when she smacked herself in the nose with the magna doodle and ended up making a trip to the urgent care for quite the wound. No stitches required thankfully.
Mocha used to jump back and forth between the couch and the chair when she was a young pup. Her wild dog sprints flipped the chair backwards a time or two. I recall an incident with coffee spilling once. :)
Jax hid behind the couch a significant portion of the time. He would hide there when people he didn't know came around. He sought refuge there when the kids or dog were tormenting him too much. In recent years, since Stormy's passing, he has peeked out from behind the couch much more often becoming more social and craving more attention.
The kitchen. The place where countless meals were cooked and served. One of the many routes the kids used to run around in circles through the house. The main place where party guests hung out munching on delicious eats for every birthday party, gathering, or other celebration. And that chandelier? How many times did so many of us conk our heads on that chandelier??? Ouch! The best memory of that chandelier is the time I caught Abby hanging on it. She had just learned to climb and found herself on top of the kitchen table. I was on the phone with Brandon and sitting in the office when I heard a clanging noise. I walked into the kitchen to find that monkey hanging on the chandelier!
How many delicious treats did the kids help me bake in the kitchen! Gavin always loved to help when he was little. I remember his fear of the mixer. I think it was too loud for him. He didn't like loud noises when he was little. Abby didn't get too cook with me quite as much here but the times she did, she loved it. The kids helped to decorate all kinds of cookies and cupcakes on that island. We also carved pumpkins and dyed eggs at the island every year.
Those floors, oh how I will miss those floors. Of all the changes we made, replacing the floors in March was one of the best. We got rid of the worn out, stained white vinyl and put in this beautiful floor.
And the dishwasher? Yep, we replaced it all by ourselves last fall. Brandon did the electrical, I did the plumbing. This house taught us a lot about completing projects on your own so we didn't pay an arm and a leg to have someone else do it for us.
The island. We always had a good indication of how tall the kids were getting when they'd be running through the house, make an attempt to run by the island, and instead run smack into the island counter. Oops! They both did it and had the bruises on their foreheads to prove it.
This room as intended as a formal dining room when we moved in. There was a horrible brass chandelier that hung there for years until we finally replaced it. We used this room as our office space.
The window on the left, that's where Mocha pulled down the curtains, more than once, when she was in her crate. She'd get a hold of a piece of the curtain and pull it into her kennel. She tore the rod right off the wall. I'll never forget coming down the stairs in the morning and seeing the messes she'd have made. One would think that a dog in a kennel wouldn't get into mischief. Not true. We can certainly attest to that. One of the cat beds used to be in this room and when Mocha was a puppy she would curl herself into a tiny ball and sleep in the cat bed.
In the early days of living in this house I had a desk in this room that I used to make scrapbooks. Unfortunately with the addition of kids and passage of time I haven't been able to work on scrapbooks much, if at all.
Of course the room also contained a host of kid toys as well. Most recently the play kitchen was in this room and the kids spent quite a bit of time making all kinds of meals and sometimes they'd cook up a bit of poison for me so that I could put on my best "I've been poisoned" act. They loved it. The kids also loved to play campfire in this room. They would close the curtains, pile up the dog toys, place book lights under the dog toys to illuminate them like fire, and bring in their blankets and pillows.
Upstairs we made a stop in Abby's room. Abby's room was Gavin's room first of course. It used to be decorated in Noah's Ark with white and green walls and a border around the room. This room was where we spent countless hours in the glider for feedings, cuddles, stories, and just rocking to sleep on those very sleepless nights. We changed so many sheets in the crib of an infant boy who just peed like crazy at night and needed to have his diaper changed every night after I got home from second shift just to make sure he wouldn't have a major leak by morning. We also changed many sheets of the infant girl who seemed to have a thing about pulling poo out of her diaper during nap time and redecorating with it.
When it came time to give Abby a big girl room we painted the room a soft purple. I think it was one of our best room re-dos that we've done. She loved her purple room and hopes to have a purple AND pink room in the new house. She said she would like one wall to be pink, or maybe the closet purple and the rest of the room pink.
Another room belonging to a big kid. Gavin got the boot from the former Noah's Ark room when he started making attempts to climb out of his crib. That's when we decided to move him to a big boy bed. Knowing we wanted to have another baby, it didn't make sense to convert the Noah's Ark room to a big kid room. So, we painted this room a fresh blue, bought him big boy furniture, and moved him in. He was so excited to help daddy get his furniture built and into the room. Gavin liked his room but it was always a bit dark. The one window on the side didn't brighten it up to his liking and his one and only wish for a new home was to have a room with two windows. No worries kiddo, you're getting two windows.
This is the hallway bath. It's the bathroom where we placed the blue baby tub on the counter and sponge bathed our newborns after bringing them home from the hospital. Our kids learned how to use a potty here, and in one particular case, after a very very long hard fight with some unusual tactics involving Pull-Ups. They learned how to brush their own teeth. They loved to take bubble baths in the tub and either color on the tiles with bath crayons or use bath paints.
Our teeny tiny master bathroom. Were we fortunate to have a bathroom off our bedroom? Of course. Was it tiny and annoying for us to both try and get ready for work at the same time on the rare occasion we work the same hours? You bet! That bathroom was a nightmare at times. We had a leak in the ceiling above our kitchen table. Specifically above Gavin's high chair tray. We thought it was the shower because the shower constantly was leaking onto the floor and there was a crack in the shower pan. We had a contractor come in to replace the shower and repair the source of the leak. When they removed the toilet so they could do the work, they found the toilet phalange was broken. The leak was actually coming from the toilet. A portion of the ceiling downstairs was cut out and replaced. The entire textured ceiling had to be sprayed with water, scraped, and then re-stamped. The bathroom served its purpose and that's about all I have to say about that.
Our very own Ansel Adams took this picture for us so we didn't have to use the other selfie we took. This was the very first room we painted when we moved in to the house. We had all kinds of ideas for replacing the ceiling fan, which we never did. We planned to change all of the outlets to white instead of cream. We put on the white plates, bought the white outlets, but never changed out the outlets. I suppose you get to what you can and just leave the rest. I made the curtains that hang in this room. It was the first time I had ever sewn curtains. We needed blackout curtains when Brandon was on thirds years ago. They didn't turn out perfectly but they did the trick!
I remember a combined six months of babies sleeping in our room next to my side of the bed. I also remember middle of the night feedings where I would fall back to sleep and wake up later with whichever infant laying across my lap on the Boppy pillow. I recall putting Gavin on his play mat in our bedroom just outside the bathroom door while I showered trying to keep him content while I got cleaned up.
Stormy used to love sitting on the window sills and there are still some claw marks on the wall where she would struggle to climb up occasionally. Mocha used to be so cute standing at the sill looking out at her backyard. She always seemed to be surveying her kingdom.
I didn't take a picture of the laundry room because well, it's a laundry room. But one thing I will always remember, besides how much laundry I did over the years or how we used it like a pantry because we didn't have a pantry, is the sound of the cat door every time a kitty would run in to use the litter box or get a bite to eat.
We took that last walk around. We reminisced and took photos. Then we sadly drove away from our empty house. I felt terrible leaving it there empty and alone. But then I realized it isn't empty at all. The house is full. It's bursting at the seams with memories and experiences. They are memories from those who came before us, memories of us and all the joy and tears we shared here, and it's now waiting. It's waiting for the new couple who is so early in their life together, quite similar to the place in time we were in when we bought the house, to make even more memories.
We went to closing almost two weeks ago. I took a quick picture of the kids at the fountain in front of the title company office. I didn't want to forget, this was the day we officially sold our first house, all of us together.
This adventure of ours continues. We are grateful for the support of our families and friends in this new chapter. We are incredibly grateful for the guidance and hard work of our wonderful Realtor Ms. Betsy. Thankfully we are continuing down this road with her, and all of her experience, by our side.
No comments:
Post a Comment