Evelyn just informed me that her tummy hurts because she ate a nickel. Great.
Anyway...
Last week we made the exciting announcement that we had purchased a house. We are very excited about this house. It first went up on the market about 2 months ago, around the time we were moving into our rental. Now, we weren't originally planning on even looking for a house until October since we are locked into a 6-month lease on our rental place, but when we saw this place we decided we had to at least go on a tour, so we called our real-estate agent up and asked if she could show it to us. Unfortunately, she told us that an offer had just been accepted on the home and that it was no longer showing. Bummer, but oh well. Something else would come along.
Fast-forward now to last Friday when our real-estate agent called and left a message on the phone. Financing for the previous buyers had fallen through and the house was available again. Would we be interested? Well, if it was a few months from now then we would definitely be interested. Would the sellers be willing to agree to some terms that would allow us to avoid the need to pay for a mortgage and a rental contract simultaneously? If so then we would like to see the house. Dorene (agent) called us back a little later and told us the sellers were willing to work with us and we could see the house the next day.
On Saturday afternoon we had planned a babysitter anyway so Rachel could take me to a Brazilian place for my birthday, so it was easy to have the sitter come a half-hour earlier so we could see the house. As soon as we saw it we walked in I fell in love with the place. It was large enough to have a lot of visitors over, our family could grow up in it, and it had an amazing back yard. We made an offer the next morning, got approved for the financing that same day, and signed the papers that night. It had been less than 48 hours since we even found out the house was back on the market, and now it was ours.
We've already posted a bunch of pictures of the house earlier this week. Scroll down to see the next post if you want a full tour.
So now I can move on to this week.
There were two exciting things that happened this week. The first was a work party that was hosted by the practice owner at his newly acquired house. This place was nice! over 5,500 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 5 car garage, a swimming pool, and 5 acres of surrounding woodland with a river running through it. The living room had a super large-screen TV that took up an entire wall. The kitchen had buttons on the sink for hot/cold water, sprite, coke, and "other." The master bathroom had a shower with 12 shower heads, each one being controlled individually for flow pattern, direction, and temperature via an electronic touch pad mounted on the wall. The downstairs had an indoor sauna and hot tub. And here's the clincher- he can control everything, from the air conditioning to the volume on the TV, with a touch of a button on his phone. Again, this place was nice!
But here's the cool part- despite all of this, the only thing Evelyn wanted to do was hike down to see the river. And I was happy to take her. I hope that she stays this way- I guess different families have different priorities, and that is why I could only smile and wave at everyone as they enjoyed the magnificent view from the spacious back deck and slowly got themselves drunk. They left the forest and the river for us to enjoy. And that is okay by me.
The second cool thing we did this week was go to the boat show in Coeur d'Alene. I was excited about this, but not super excited. They were boats. A boat is a boat. Okay- wrong. This was really, really cool. It was actually a wooden boat show, and the boats were beautiful. No, make that gorgeous. Each one had a story of painstaking maintenance and/or restoration behind it, and it was almost as fun to watch the owners as it was to look at the boats themselves. It was obvious that over the thousands of hours that went into the boats the owners had developed an almost emotional relationship with their projects. To watch them instinctively caress the wood as they told the story about how the boat had been passed down for generations, or how they discovered it wrecked up on some old beach, was, for me, nothing short of inspiring. Of course there was also a lot of other commercialized events and exhibits around the place, but I think these stories are what this was really all about. It was a chance for these people to really share a part of themselves with the public through their craftsmanship. Now, I'm not really a boat guy. But you better believe that every year when this event comes around I will have it marked on my calendar.
Here's Rachel's favorite. It is sort of like a floating Rolls-Royce. She especially likes the seats in the front and says that they brought back memories for her of sticking her head up in the front of Tiny Dancer (her family's little boat).
And this...is obviously not a wooden boat. This is a $509,000 yacht that Evelyn and I got to tour. Wow. That is all I have to say.
Looks like you're having fun exploring your new area. How fun to go to a boat show! I didn't even know they had such a thing. How is Evelyn's tummy? Did she really swallow a nickel?
ReplyDelete