Exciting News!

Finally! Something we have been looking forward to for a looooong time! We are moving into a house! It's a rental, but still a house with our very own garage and backyard. No neighbors above (although we've loved having Naybah C up there!) and no neighbors below. No having to walk from the parking lot with child and groceries in tow. We are super excited and can't wait to have a little more room for our things and a lot more play area for Ian.

For the past few months, we (okay...me) have been looking at rental houses online in several different neighborhoods. We finally got our plans for this year settled enough to narrow the search down to a few neighborhoods and get serious about actually getting into a rental house. We'll buy someday, but for now we are happy to not have all the responsibilities of owning the home ourselves. We were referred to Megan Phelps, a great realtor who knows this area very well, and she was fantastic in helping us through the process. We would totally recommend her to anyone looking for (or selling) a house in the area.

The first day we went looking at houses, we saw four different homes. This one immediately stood out to us - it was Ian's favorite too. Megan was super sweet and took us to see a few other homes, and was patient through the decision making process. I won't go through all the details, but we really feel God opened the door wide for us to be in this house and has a purpose for us here. While there are a few things from my want list missing (like a kitchen island and paneled doors), it is a great house with a fantastic floor plan that already feels like home. It was obvious that the owners took good care of the property and we loved that it was already painted nice neutral colors. No more white walls!! (Granted, we could have painted our apartment, but would have had to paint it back to white.)

Anyways, enough talk. Here's the pictures. We snapped them really quickly as we were touring the property, so they aren't the best. I'll update them once we move in.

View of the front of the house. We love the shrubbery and bay window!

James walking from the living room to the dining room. We were also really impressed by the updated light fixtures (hard to tell in this picture) and super happy to see ceiling fans!

View from the kitchen into the backyard. I love that the sliding glass doors already have curtains hanging and don't have those thick vertical blinds.

The kitchen! While there aren't a ton of cabinets in any of the houses in this subdivision, the pantry/laundry room is HUGE with lots of shelf space. And we get a breakfast bar. :-)

Blurry picture of the chandelier hanging over where the kitchen table will go. I love it! It's very pretty and matches our table really well.

Better view of the pantry/laundry room. Gotta love those shelves! (They look shorter in the picture than they are in real life.)

Finally...a back yard!! We're thrilled about this!

Master bedroom with vaulted ceilings and updated light fixture.

Garden tub/shower combo in the master bath. We actually prefer this to a separate tub and shower and were really happy to see the combo.

Bedroom with bay windows. Soooo pretty!

We feel very blessed to be moving to this house. We can't wait to get in and settled! A huge thanks to Megan for all of her hard work and diligence through the whole process. (We didn't realize quite how much paper work realtors have to do, and Megan was always on top of things!)