Oh my!

Was March really the last time I posted on here? OOPS!!! Sorry! Well, since I posted last this is what happened:

1. Alex finished Kindergarten.
2. We went to Disney World and had a great time!
3. Imediately after Disney World, I went to Washington DC with our church's choir and orchestra.
4. The kids and I had fun at Vacation Bible School.
5. Mike and I have gone house hunting (a little more on that later).
6. We've started a massive home improvement list.


We've been pretty busy.


So now, on to the house hunting/home improvements. Every year, for the last 2 or 3 years, we (mostly me but it makes me feel better to say it's Mike's fault too) get the urge to go look at houses. And it's almost always in June. I'm almost certain that if you go back to June/July of last year you'll see a long list of home improvements we made. That was because we had gone out and looked at houses but didn't find anything that interested us so we figured we'd improve some things in our house.

Well this year was a different story. We did go looking at houses and boy did we find a neighborhood we liked. It would have been new construction and they were BEAUTIFUL homes! We came home and started crunching the numbers and realized that if we could get a certain price for our house, we could really start discussing building a house in this neighborhood. The realtor ran some comps and told us our house was worth about $25,000 less than what we had hoped for. I pretty certain that we could have sold this house for $25,000 more two years ago.

So, that meant we would be very house poor if we built a house and we weren't even sure if our house would sell in this market. But now I've seen a house that has things in it that I have been dreaming about having for almost 10 years. Not really huge things to most people but to me, they are major things.

Our house was the model home for the neighborhood. That means that while most people in the neighborhood got to pick what flooring, countertops, wall colors, and even changing of floor plans to suit their needs, we got what was prebuilt. And for some reason, they decided that the model home didn't need a pantry. Even though it's in the original floor plans for every house that is this particular model, I don't have one. And I didn't have one in our old house either. So I've had to come up with creative ways to store all the food that 4 people eat.

We decided that after living in this house for 7 years, it was time to instead of looking for another home, we would start making impovements to this home. Basically make the house look how we would have wanted it to if we had built it.

So that's what we're up to right now. We've crossed off one big thing from our list: a pantry!!! That's right folks! I actually have a real, honest to goodness pantry!!!!! You'll have to wait to see pictures though. I have to go make the kids some lunch. I'll be back with pictures of my new, beautiful pantry!