Our house, Another stressful step in this process!

During the Fall of last year (2011), Brandon's dad started getting busy again and work was coming in. Brandon had started a large land clearing job for his dad in October of 2011. After he went to work for the fire dept he continued working on the clearing job on his days off from the fire dept. Brandon continues to work for his dad on his days off . It is working out pretty good and I know he really enjoys to still be able to work for his dad like we planned on. In September of last year, the second job I was working decided not to renew the security contract. I was out of a regular second job. It was bittersweet because we would not have that extra income but was glad that I would have my weekends back! While Brandon was super busy working, working, and studying for work, I was spending time with family and getting into health & fitness which I will get into later. But we were both very busy it seemed throughout this holiday season. I lost my dear sweet grandpa, my mothers dad, a week before Thanksgiving. It is very hard to lose a loved one even if their health has been down for a while and it wasn't totally unexpected. He will and is greatly missed!

We had decided that logically, the best thing for us to do was to to sell or rent our house before we bought land and built a house in order to avoid having the double mortgage payments. We knew that Brandon had to get hired at a fire department first so that we would have two incomes instead of trying to eliminate one house and gaining another with just one and a half incomes. It was always one thing before the other! So once Brandon got hired with the fire department we were more than ready to list our house on the market to sell. Selling it was our first option. We briefly discussed leasing it but didnt really think that we wanted to deal with renters and everything else that goes along with having a rental house. Brandon started working for the fire dept on November 02, 2011 and we met with a realtor on November the 7th! "Chop! Chop! No time to waste!" LOL I was thinking that we may be hitting it at a good time with us coming up on the end of the year. Some people move kids during that time because it's not in the middle of a semester BUT then again it's also the holiday time and people may not be wanting the expense of moving during this time. So, it began to be a waiting game.... Then the holidays came and went without even one showing. Thank goodness for a few good distractions after the first of the year to keep me from stressing over it! On January 23, 2012 we all welcomed my sweet nephew to this big world!
A few weeks later I got to celebrate my birthday with a skiing vacation in Taos, NM with my family, minus Brandon because he had to work. We had an awesome time! My brother, Chris got to ski for his first time and my dad got to get a little more comfortable on his "ski legs"! Unfortantely the ski boots injured Kathy's legs the first day and she was unable to try again the second day. Still we had a great time! I missed Brandon terribly and was so happy to be home with him.

Mr. Grady has stolen everyone's heart!
Here he is on Valentines Day 2012

Me, Dad, & Chris on our last run of the trip.
It was snowing pretty hard (to us anyway) & thought it was the best run!



I'm not sure if it was in February or March but we got caught off guard one evening when a realtor called and scheduled our very first showing for the house! That kind of lifted our spirits a little bit where the house was concerned. It can really dampen your spirits when you have three full months of NO activity whatsoever... It has definantely been a time of continued support to each other. We would have to help each other stay positive and stay on track with what we have planned. It seemed when Brandon would get discouraged, I'd have to remind him of how close we are to what we are working towards and then there were times that I would get frustrated and impatient with the process and how slow things were progressing and Brandon lifted me up. To this date, we still have only had that one showing that actually came inside and looked at the house. We have had several showings scheduled but once they get to the house they don't come in because they don't care for the area or didn't like dogs and we have one in the yard.
During all of this we did find some spare time to talk about where we would live when we sold the house. A lot of people had asked where we were going to live after they found out that we were not going to build until after we moved out of our house. We had several different options and ultimately decided on living in the living quarters of our horse trailer, next to his parents house. This will definantely be an experience! Now that we made that decision, **insert additonal step here**, we knew we had to have some work done on the trailer before we started living in it full time. On March 10th we delivered it to the dealership in Georgetown, TX. and dropped it off with a list of things to check/repair. They told us it would be at least 4 to 6 weeks before it was ready. That kind of seemed like a long time but it felt good to have a date to look forward to! On our drive to Georgetown with the trailer we had a lot of drive time to visit and talk about our plans. While we were talking we decided to plan on leasing the house instead of selling it, unless we got a buyer with the right price before the contract expired.  He thought that in the long run, leasing this house would be very beneficial for us to have that extra income.  During this same time, Brandon was working with his dad on a job in Montgomery for a couple of days doing some paving. After the job was complete, he had the equipment delivered to our house. He surprised me by telling me that we were going to have our driveway paved! This was super exciting for me! I was just hoping that I'd be able to enjoy it before we moved! He said that it was something he wanted to have done if we were going to have renters living there. I didn't disagree ;-) He also said there were a couple of other things, like the roof & some plumbing, that he wanted to do with the house before we got renters so that we would have peace of mind knowing that these things were in working order. ***Insert addional steps here*** Now that we felt pretty certain that we will be renting the house instead of selling it, we want things to be in good shape so hopefully the renters will see that and take better care of it (HA!). On March 24th, our driveway was paved!! Hallelujah!! It makes the place look so nice! I just love it! Harrell Construction did an awesome job!

Among the things Brandon wanted to do with the house, I decided to do something as well! Not too many of you have been to my house (Mammies house) but the ones that have remember this! In both of the bathrooms was this hideous wallpaper! I'm sure it was great in 1975! So, I decided to paint the walls of the bathrooms. I thought it would be a huge help in attracting prospective renters. This kind of started out as my project that I started on a Saturday that Brandon was working at the fire dept. Well, it is hard to paint one area and have the whole area look good without painting the whole area. So... we decided we had to paint the trim AND cabinets also! This turned into a bigger and more time consuming project than I initially planned. It took several weekends and weeknights. We had to Kilz the walls with the wallpaper, remove drawers & cabinet doors, tape and re-tape, replace the hardware on the cabinets..... We almost got to the point where we wanted to poke our eyes out rather than paint anymore. But, the results were 100% better! It is hard to do one improvement without thinking about doing another improvement. The floors in the bathrooms/kitchen could be replaced, the appliances need updating but you have to stop somewhere right? Check out the progress pictures -