Oh, How I've Missed You!!

HELLO!  I am so excited to join the world of blogging again!! :)  The last couple of months have been so crazy for our family.  At the end of April, I went to CA to perform with the OCMCO Symphony & I got a phone call one morning in my hotel room letting me know that we had 60 days to be out of our rental house.  We were not excited about moving, but feeling ready for a change.  Because the 60 days notice gave us time to buy a house, we started house hunting like mad!  We found a few houses that were OK, one we almost put an offer on, but we certainly didn't find a home that we were super excited about and nothing that felt right for our family.  At the end of May, my family traveled to Utah for a week so I could record a CD and perform a couple concerts with the EVMCO and OCMCO.  We spent a fabulous week up in the Salt Lake City area, but when we got home, we had to face the reality that we needed to find another rental home.  I think we got home around 1 or 2am one night and we were up early the next morning looking at rental homes.  We found a clean home somewhat quickly that we felt we could make work.  I was sad to leave our nice rental and it's 5-burner gas cooktop, but we are loving the location of our new rental because we can get just about anywhere we want to go in 5-10 minutes rather than the often 20+ minutes we were traveling at our previous rental.

Somewhere in all that mess, we did put an offer on a house ... one that we had planned to tear down and use the land to build a custom home.  We gave the bank a solid offer, but our offer was not chosen, so it wasn't meant to be.  We continued to casually look for a home or piece of land to build.  About a week ago, a sign went up right outside of our new neighborhood for half-acre lots, so instead of unpacking boxes & setting up our new home this last week, we've been working on buying a lot! At first we thought we weren't going to buy one of these lots because we initially set-out looking for a larger lot, but after thinking about how much we don't like to do yard work, reminding ourselves that Hubby is working 6 long days every week, and that we still have oodles of student loans to repay, we've decided a "smaller" yard will be perfect for our family right now.  Sometime after 10pm last night, we signed the purchase contract and handed over a nice chunk of change to reserve our  lot. SOOO ... if anyone wants to come be my neighbor, lots are going super fast ... I think someone else is signing for one of the lots today, so I believe there will be ONLY THREE lots left.  All the homes in the little neighborhood  are custom ranging from 3500 SF to over 5000 SF.  AZ-style homes are not allowed :), there will be lantern-style street lots, etc ... just a cute spot.  And most of the families who will be building in there have 4-6 kids, so it's going to be one giant party every day!!  So, come be my neighbor if you're looking for a neat spot!!  Oh, there's one cul-de-sac lot left, too! (Right next door to me!!)

So ... that's the last 2 months of my life in a nutshell!