My Really Great Family (and Our Search for a Home)
Angelee and I were married in June of 2004. After a brief stint staying at her parents house, we moved to her sister’s newly purchased home that had a basement apartment. This is where we lived when we had Bella, and were there about 6 more months before we decided to move into my parent’s basement apartment, which was a sizable space and kitchen upgrade. We’ve been there ever since, over 3 and a half years! While my parents have been so kind to let us stay, and we love that our kids are so close to Grandma and Grandpa, for close to a year now we’ve been really hungry to get a place of our own. With Angelee’s brother Dustin as a real estate agent, we’ve been searching for a home since January-ish.
We’ve tried to keep an open mind throughout the process, but definitely have our criteria that we try to match up to our supposed dream home (at least for this stage of life). My major concern was that I didn’t want us to buy a home that we would be forced out of due to space issues when our 3rd and 4th kids come along. That being said, if within 5 years we’re ready to skedaddle… as long as it’s financially feasible, why not? In other words, we wanted the length of tenure at our first home to be on our terms, not forced on us by unwieldy family size. So, space being the main issue, I made sure that nearly every house we saw was at a minimum of 2500 square feet. In the end I was pretty sure that even 2500 was pretty small for what we will likely need to grow into, so my secret number was really at 2700 :).
We found some houses early on that were semi-promising except for the single cockroach in the ice cream: The Lehi house was far from family and at a super wacky angle on the lot, so bizarre; The Cedar Hills house was gorgeous but also far away from family (though close to AF canyon climbing… but we all know that didn’t hold a whole lot of clout in the discussions).
What follows is a series of posts about our house hunt and other family-related stats. It seemed easier for readability to break this into multiple posts. I actually had it all in one, but it seemed kinda bogus, so here are a list of the posts in this “House Hunters” series: