Anyway, this month has been a little nuts so I’m going to categorize it in the hopes that I won’t just spew a collage of thoughts onto the screen here.
HOUSE
We’ve been helping my brother look for a house to purchase. Maybe “we” is misleading. Tyler has been helping my brother find a house to purchase while I sit back on the sidelines and admire pictures of kitchens that are cooler than mine. Doing so quickly lead us to the conclusion that home prices are vastly different from what they were like when we bought our home. When we were looking back in 2008, $120K got you a dumpy, old house in need of huge amounts of TLC unless it was in inner-city Ogden, in which case your neighbors were likely drug dealers and convicts. Haha! Okay, the neighbor part might be a bit of an exaggeration but you get the picture, right? Our house was a total steal at the time.
We’ve been helping my brother look for a house to purchase. Maybe “we” is misleading. Tyler has been helping my brother find a house to purchase while I sit back on the sidelines and admire pictures of kitchens that are cooler than mine. Doing so quickly lead us to the conclusion that home prices are vastly different from what they were like when we bought our home. When we were looking back in 2008, $120K got you a dumpy, old house in need of huge amounts of TLC unless it was in inner-city Ogden, in which case your neighbors were likely drug dealers and convicts. Haha! Okay, the neighbor part might be a bit of an exaggeration but you get the picture, right? Our house was a total steal at the time.
Now days, $120K gets you a cute, split level home built in the 90’s with lovely little kitchens that elicit gasps of jealous admiration from yours truly. Those were going for $150 – 160K when we were in the market.
You see where this is going, right? Add this to the fact that interest rates are at an all time low and can’t stay this low much longer, and Tyler didn’t have to do much convincing to get me to look at houses for us too.
We figured we would look tentatively since we’re still fine where we’re at and that if by chance we found something golden, we’d jump on it for future purposes (i.e. more space with lower payments).
We put our first offer on a beautiful Hud home in Clinton. This home was way too good to be true and I’m positive that our bid was nowhere near the final sales price. Since then we’ve been looking more rigorously because every time we found a home we liked, it already had about 9 different offers on it. It would seem that you have to jump on a house the moment it hits the market if you actually want to accomplish anything (example: we put an offer on a home in Layton yesterday on the second day it had been listed. It already had 3 other offers).
I can tell that I’m on my soap box now so I’m just going to summarize instead; we are looking for a new house. Will we get one? Maybe… or maybe not. That’s the beauty of it—we’re fine either way. But if it happens, it will happen fast.
ST. PATTY’S DAY
Our wonderful friends Luke and Andrea had such an awesome idea. They had a St. Patrick’s Day party. So awesome! We had a yummy Irish dinner and enjoyed some great company while Aleah tried her hardest to gross out Britney’s date using the classic spit up technique. I am now an official fan of St. Patty’s Day parties and of Andrea’s delicious potato concoction (Andrea, if you’re reading this, you must teach me how to make that dish!).
Our wonderful friends Luke and Andrea had such an awesome idea. They had a St. Patrick’s Day party. So awesome! We had a yummy Irish dinner and enjoyed some great company while Aleah tried her hardest to gross out Britney’s date using the classic spit up technique. I am now an official fan of St. Patty’s Day parties and of Andrea’s delicious potato concoction (Andrea, if you’re reading this, you must teach me how to make that dish!).
GROSS BUGS
Tyler doesn’t want me to post about this because he thinks it is embarrassing. I kind of agree. However, since we’re using this as a family journal, I think it would be pretty silly not to post about because it has been quite a big deal to our family. Besides, it’s not like we could have done anything else to prevent this from happening.
Since we’re thinking about moving, we decided that we should start getting our house ready to list. Our carpet has definitely seen better days so we decided to recarpet the place. This was quite an undertaking since it meant that all of our furniture had to be packed into our living room and we pretty much lost all walking space for a few days. While our home was disheveled, we happened to move our refrigerator which I’m positive we wouldn’t have done under normal, non-carpeting circumstances. This is what we found behind it:
I like to think I’m a pretty calm, collected person in most times of trial. Not when I find this popping up on walls in my house. We knew instantly that it was either mold or termites but we had no idea who to call and ask about it at 10:00 at night.
Long story short, it was termites. DISGUSTING!! If you notice me scratching my legs and arms and stomach, etc… it’s because these things totally creep me out. My skin crawls and itches every time I think about it.
The first exterminator quoted us about $2,000 to come take care of the problem. Crap. Thankfully we called several companies, did our research, and ended up with a company that was “Gephart-approved” (whatever that entails), offered a 15 year, transferrable warranty to anyone who owns the home (new buyer included), and used the best product on the market (Termador). This guy drilled holes every 12 inches around the house, injected termite-killing magic poison, and called it a day.
$1400 later we have new carpet, a termiteless house, and a checking account that feels very much like it got the short end of the stick. However, I will say that we got very lucky. The exterminators told us that we caught the problem early, that the bugs were only in one spot in our house, and that termites are super common in the Ogden area. Knowing what I know now, I would never buy a house in the Terrace or anywhere in Ogden that didn’t come with that transferrable guaranty. So… if you’re looking in the area, keep that in mind so you don’t wind up paying for it like we did.
OUR SWEET BABY
Aleah is getting more fun every day. She smiles and laughs all the time now, rolls, scoots, and is even starting to crawl around. She wears her emotions on her sleeve so you always know where you stand and how she is feeling.
Aleah is getting more fun every day. She smiles and laughs all the time now, rolls, scoots, and is even starting to crawl around. She wears her emotions on her sleeve so you always know where you stand and how she is feeling.
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| Our Newish Toy |
We bought her this very used saucer toy for $10 at a consignment sale. As I said, it is very used. Furthermore, it partially melted in the back of our car while it sat at the dealership (see next category for explanation), so all the toys are bent at funny angles. Did she care? Not a bit.
The moment we sat her in that thing, she lit up with excitement. It’s so cute because when she gets really excited, her eyes open up wide and she puts her arms out to the side and shakes like crazy. She did this for quite some time and then couldn’t pick one toy on the saucer to play with so she constantly went back and forth from one toy to another and totally loved it. This was all during conference so needless to say, I’ll definitely need to catch up on my Ensign reading next month. It’s just so fun and totally distracting to see such a happy baby in front of you.
Lesson learned: babies do not need expensive or luxurious toys, so there’s no need to spend your life’s fortune to make your baby happy. Just love them and play with them and they will be satisfied. One of my favorite things is hanging out with Aleah while I cook dinner. I sit her in her bumbo, hand her a spatula or other similar cooking utensil, and she entertains herself the entire time. I love this about children
Lesson learned: babies do not need expensive or luxurious toys, so there’s no need to spend your life’s fortune to make your baby happy. Just love them and play with them and they will be satisfied. One of my favorite things is hanging out with Aleah while I cook dinner. I sit her in her bumbo, hand her a spatula or other similar cooking utensil, and she entertains herself the entire time. I love this about children
CAR
This post is already long so I’m going to keep this as short as possible. Basically our car started having problems. We took it to the dealer and freaked when they told us all the stuff they wanted to replace. We cheered the whole way home (and promptly forgot about Aleah’s toy sitting in the trunk) about letting them up-sell us to an extended warranty when we bought our car. We wondered if we were suckers after we bought into it back in the day but since our car repairs amounted to around $4K and we paid a whopping $50, we were pleased as punch. Plus, we got to drive around an SUV for a week that was just as expensive as it was beautiful while they worked on it. We now have a new car after all they did to it. Sweet deal!
Tyler here. I was able to sell our Bravada this month. I was quite sad to see the car go, I have grown quite fond of it. The four doors were amazing. I know Shaela really liked it as well but with us looking for a house we might be needing the extra cash. She did say that she has enjoyed having a new car to drive. I think the next car I'll be looking for is a Honda Accord EX-L or Toyota Camry XLE both of those cars would be fun to drive. I think a new car every 5-6 months would be great. Thankfully we buy at the auction.
CLOTHING SWAP
I received an online invitation to a clothing swap and decided to go check it out. I didn’t know a soul there but it was totally awesome!
Only four people showed up but it was so worthwhile. All of us girls cleaned out our closets and brought the clothes that we weren’t wearing anymore. Then we did something beautiful—we traded. I ended up with a cleaner closet and some great new clothes. I can only imagine how much cooler it would have been if even more people showed up. Seriously. You should all do it and invite me so I can come to more.
SCHOOL
Tyler started his graduate classes this month. Eek! Lol. It has actually been much better than we expected so far. He is enjoying the coursework and the schedule hasn’t done anything too crazy to our lives just yet so we are quite thrilled with how things are playing out. I keep telling him that he is lucky because unlike many other students out there, at this point he knows that he picked the right field since he is enjoying himself so much.
Tyler started his graduate classes this month. Eek! Lol. It has actually been much better than we expected so far. He is enjoying the coursework and the schedule hasn’t done anything too crazy to our lives just yet so we are quite thrilled with how things are playing out. I keep telling him that he is lucky because unlike many other students out there, at this point he knows that he picked the right field since he is enjoying himself so much.
CONCLUSION
March has been a great month with a lot of big events. I feel like the paragraph dedicated to Aleah falls short of how much fun we’ve had with her this month, but this entry has gone on long enough I think. She really is the most wonderful, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or known and every one of our days are better because she is a part of them.
March has been a great month with a lot of big events. I feel like the paragraph dedicated to Aleah falls short of how much fun we’ve had with her this month, but this entry has gone on long enough I think. She really is the most wonderful, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or known and every one of our days are better because she is a part of them.
In short, life is good. Here’s looking forward to a new, beautiful, bug-free month! April, here we come.
