Movin' on Up

Well, that's the plan at least.

DH has been commuting forty five minutes to an hour each way every work day for the past 4 years.  I know that's tame compared to some areas but then he also spends at least 9 and sometimes up to 12 hours at work on top of the commute.  On a bad day he doesn't get to see DD, and on a good day he gets a few hurried moments in the morning, and then the same before she goes to bed.  Even when we have family visiting who'd be more than happy to stay at home with DD so we could have a nice dinner out he doesn't get home early enough for us to take advantage.

All that blah, blah, blah to say that family time and DH's mental heath have been taking a beating and it's time to do something about it.

We've been looking at houses online (thank goodness for the internet for making this process so much easier than tromping through 6 dozen houses only to find out that there's something just. not. right. about each and every one) since February, or so.  It took until early April to actually visit any, one of which we really wanted to like but just couldn't (it was a very nice house, it just didn't work for us), and one of which would have been much better had DD been a few years older.

And then we went on our trip and missed out on a house that we assumed would still be available when we returned based on the length of time houses have been sitting on the market.  Lesson learned.

Anyway, after that miss, DH started looking at houses we had seen online* after work with the plan that anything he liked I would see in the next day or two.  Shortly after this, DH looked at a house on Friday, he called me and said 'you need to look at this house,' so we looked at it on Saturday, and made an offer today after lots of discussions about the pros and cons not only of the house but the neighborhood (hopefully pro enough to make one of the biggest negatives of the house bearable).  I'm feeling strangely zen about the wait to hear back from the sellers since we low-balled the list price by a little under 10%. (Dare I say it feels somewhat like a 2ww when you're convinced you're not pregnant?)

We also decided to sell our current house sooner rather than later regardless of the outcome of the offer.  We're going to move, we have to move, and whether it's into this house or another, or we decide to build again and rent for X months, our current house has to go.  This makes me sad despite knowing it's for the best.  Our current house was a custom - we put lots of thought into the layout, incorporated things which make our lives easier, spent too many hours arguing about the light fixtures, and literally invested blood sweat and tears into a major landscaping project we completed ourselves.  All that, plus it's the house to which we brought DD home and in which so many milestones have been marked. 

I know from watching whatever that organizing show that was on TLC where they have the big yard sale after going through the accumulated stuff (do you know the show I mean?) that it's not the items (or in this case, the walls) that hold the memories, but it's going to be hard to walk away anyway.

So, I'm feeling a mix of excitement (that we're hopefully not going to be stuck in a holding pattern for much longer), and sadness (that I'm leaving only after finally making some good local friends), and dreading the move(s) since they suck whether you are looking forward to it or not!


*When we moved here 9 years ago, the internet real estate listings were in their infancy (4 grainy pictures were excellent and the search function was a joke) & since DH was in grad school and I was working, DH did a bunch of the looking without me.  I ended up feeling really left out of the process.