Pardon my silence...

We've been busy recently.  This term has honestly been pretty crazy.  I got the flu in January, and then I've gotten two different colds since then.  I usually get sick a total of two times each year.  I blame the stress of starting a new job along with buying a house.

We bought a house!

We've been dreaming of buying a house for years.  It's not that we think that everybody has to own a home.  Renting is great for a lot of reasons.  However, I wanted a garden area, and a composter, and chickens...

When we moved up to the area, I hesitantly started looking at houses within the first few months.  My heart still belonged in Corvallis, but I wanted to have a home where I felt like we would stay unless craziness happened.  We asked to stay in Corvallis, but God planted us here instead.  So here we are!  We didn't honestly think we'd buy a home right away.  It's not that we were broke, but we certainly didn't have a good down payment when coming out of college.  However, near the end of January we started to get serious about buying a house.  House prices are low, and interest rates are great.  We also had saved a decent amount of money in the three months while Matthew was working, and I was starting to bring in some money each month as well.  We viewed one home and decided not to make an offer, and then we viewed this home at the beginning of the month, and we made an offer.

The process of buying a house is so tedious and stressful.  Everything is totally up in the air, you don't know what people are thinking, and you are dealing with a lot of money.  Fortunately, the sellers of this house seemed to be reasonable people.  We eventually talked through email as well as through the real estate agent.  There's so much time on pins and needles though... Will they accept the offer or what will they counter?  (Another offer came in before ours was under contract, so that offered extra uncertainty!)   We're paying hundreds of dollars for an inspection, what if something horrible shows up?  Will the sellers be willing to pay for repairs?  Will the appraisal be high enough so that the bank will give us our loan? Will the loan even go through?

It all happened, though, and wonderfully everything worked out as well as we could ever have hoped.  Now we own a three bedroom home that was built in the 1950's and then updated recently.  The sellers built a pond in the back with their own hands, and there are already four raised garden beds ready for planting.  Plus, there are strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries in the yard!  We already got a human-powered reel mower off of Craigslist, and we're waiting for the ground to recover from the inches of rain and snow we had the past couple of weeks.  We also are scheduled to pick up a composter off of Craigslist tomorrow evening.

The one thing that we wanted to change was the paint.  I confess: It was a want, not a need.  However, we chose to paint pretty much everything now before we move in which is the easiest time to do it, and we won't have to do it again for a long, long time.  It was the kitchen cabinets that got it all going.  I saw the dark brown cabinets, and I thought I could handle it.  However, I kept looking at them, and eventually I said, "Matthew.  The kitchen is too dark."  Well, once I started picking my colors for one room, I found that my tastes in colors really just didn't mesh with their more neutral, gray-ish tones.  It's not that what they had looked bad.  In fact, the word "classy" comes to mind.  However, let's just be honest: I'm not classy.  So, we ended up painting the whole front of the house: kitchen, dining room, and living room.  Then, because Matthew didn't like the bright yellow master bedroom, we painted that too.  Of course, the bathroom was little and dark brown (which made it look even smaller), so I tossed on some of the light blue paint from the master bedroom.  You can see how quickly things can spiral out of control!  Here is the before and after for the kitchen:

Sorry that the first photo is blurry.  For some reason, neither of us managed to take a clear picture of the kitchen that day despite the fact that we both took a couple of photos.  Matthew took this one.  We can blame him this time!  Isn't the "new" kitchen cheerful?  It may have been a want and not a need, but I know that I'll be grateful for a cheerful kitchen during all of the cloudy months.  Plus, I hope that my kitchen brings all of its visitors a little bit of happiness as well.

I've spent six days painting and cleaning the house in the past two weeks (along with finishing teaching for the term and grading finals... can we say sleep deprived?? Oh good, we can.)  We are moving into our house on Saturday, and we are so excited!  How wonderful to finally have a place where we plan to stay put.  I haven't felt that feeling since leaving my parents' home six-and-a-half years ago, and that's just too long.  I'm so excited to unpack and settle in and then start to do life in our Birchwood home.  I hear it's time to start planting some peas...