A Shoe Filled Closet: Our "forever" home

I've been MIA lately, but for good reason (at least I think it's a good reason...), we bought a house!!!

We sold Will's house back in September, and began house hunting in late October/early November. The house we bought was one of the first we saw on the very first day, and I fell in love with it from the beginning! Of course, we had just started our search and Will kept urging me to look at other houses and keep an open mind. There were other houses I liked, but my mind kept drifting back to this one.

When we first pulled up to the house, there was no "For Sale" sign in the yard, which we thought was very odd. As our realtor walked up to the front door, she noticed that there was no lock box on the front door. As we were discussing this, a man opened the door and asked if we were the 10:00 appointment. He told us their listing had expired the day before, but since we made the appointment earlier in the week, he decided to honor it (thank you, Lord!)! While the house needed some work (wall paper removed, carpets cleaned, paint), I was in love and I saw myself cooking dinners in the kitchen, setting up kids rooms upstairs, and having family meals in this house.

We saw several other houses and decided to make an offer on a different house. It had a lot of things that we liked, and Will loved it, so I gave in. We made an offer, but got a call the next day that the owners accepted another offer before ours was made. I was heart broken and scared to make an offer on another house.

We scheduled more appointments and saw a few more houses, plus made second appointments for others we had already seen. I was hesitant to ask my realtor to make an appointment for the "Grand View" house since they had pulled it off the market, but the worst they could say was "no", right? Our realtor called their realtor and at first, they weren't going to show it to us because they were concerned we weren't serious buyers. Then, the owner called back and changed his mind, he would show! I was thrilled! We spent a good deal of time in the house, then went home to discuss it. Will liked the house better the second time, but I don't think he loved it yet. He could obviously see how much I loved it and agreed to make an offer. After a few counters, we agreed on a price and bought a house!!!!

The inspection went fairly well (a few snags, but nothing that would cause us to back out of the deal), and we closed on December 19th, Merry Christmas to us!

We've been working in the house since the 21st, so I'll save the other pics for later, but here are a few pictures of the "before".