A couple of beauties and some house stuff

update: no go on the Tudor cottage. To much damage.

While in Arizona a few weeks ago, I was able to get a picture of Sarah with each of her nieces and nephew. I will try to post them so you can see how all my wonderful nieces and nephew. So far there is only one nephew, but there may be one more on the way. My SIL Laura is pregnant. We are pretty excited.

This picture here is of Sarah and Jamie who just turned 10 recently. She is such a happy beautiful girl. She is extremely smart, sensitive and caring about other people. I can really see her becoming a humanitarian, a gaurdian et liadem (sp?), or a psychologist someday or working with people who have severe handicaps like her special ed teachin' mamma. :)

As for us this weekend trying to work on selling the house getting a new one so I can get back to Newport News to reassume my work with children at CASA (like my segue?), we aren't really any closer though we do know what houses we don't want. Here is a house recap.

A particular rancher owned by a contractor looked like it had promise...until you walked into it and realize integrity and quality of work were probably not on his resume. Our realtor said he would fix anything we asked, but we simply didn't know where to start. Everything and I mean everything that he did to that house had something wrong with it; lenoleum was pealing, pergo flowers were pealing, wood wasn't trimmed to fit correctly, the add on foundation wasn't graded so water drained away from house but rather pooled. It was so promising but honestly just looked like he brought home scraps from any of his jobs and just put them in somewhere. Sarah showed her appreciation by spitting up half her bottle on the floor. Good thing we had a super soaking up burp cloth from the Kiss n Koos line of burp cloths. :) That flannel on one side, terry cloth on the other really did the job and cleaned everything up quite nicely. :)

Another house we looked at had been completely painted rich bright colors base boards and all but not by a very good painter...at all. Pretty crazy. They had dogs as well (it was a foreclosure) and so the carpet was beyond awful. It smelled to high heaven in their. It wouldn't have been as big a deal but the floors upstairs were also bad which means problems undearneath the carpet also. We kind of have a rule in this search. A low price and work is good but at the high end of our price range we better get move in ready. That was at the high end and well, you know.

We did find a house we almost put an offer out on but as a shortsale it was already pending so bummer. It was almost identical to our house here with brand spankin' new carpet. We started to put in a follow up offer in case that one didn't go through in the end, but that meant if we got it and we still had this house... well, not smart financial choice. What we did is have our realtor tell their realtor to tell the bank that if it didn't work out we had a full price offer ready to submit. I don't know, but it seemed like a safer move than all out commiting. Houses can be risky business.

There is a house we want but are still unsure of. We are going to have a friend of our's father who used to work for the city as an inspector come out at the end of the week (we hope we hope) and look it over. It is a 1935 Tudor Cottage with an add on great room and sun deck in the back. Its jus that it needs a lot of work but since it is actually lower than the low of our price range we have more room to do the work. Doing the work is actually something Dan and I love to do. I mentioned this house in an earlier post about not taking away from serving in God's kingdom and serving ourselves by investing our time and money on our selves; taking from Gods kingdome and puting it in our castle in a manner of speaking. We really really prayed about and talked to our pastor. He pointed it the cost would end up equalling what we would have spent on the other house, but time was also an issue. I want to not be so wrapped up in the house an miss out on serving God through ministries. We talked it out and saw how we could easily do both but it would take commitment and discipline on our part. Dan and I are homebodies so sometimes any excuse to stay home is used. We also love working on our house, its a shared passion. Honestly a house that doesn't need anything but a bit of paint seems boring. We may change our minds later, but well, we don't know that yet and maybe we're gluttons for punishment. Anyway, the houses value is so far above and beyond what we would pay, it would be worth it. We'll see.