"Well we have a house"!

We officially have a house! Pretty excited.  Put the offer in yesterday and back and forth 4 times in negotiation and ended up with a satisfied home buyer and seller!  Inspection is set for Monday.  Our house inspection is Friday and our new house is Monday.  A lot of inspections going on.  A few pics of our new house. We are planning on repainting the kitchen cabinets white and maybe over time new counters.  The carpet looks pretty good, but not sure until all the furniture is up. I love the neighborhood, it is pretty quiet and is in a golf community.  There is an actual tee beyond the lake that we can see from our back lanai.  Will be fun watching golfers.  There is a grapefruit tree in our backyard too.  Wondering if we can grow other fruits or veggies as well.  Pretty excited to look into this piece.

A decision we are trying to work through right now is if we want to be on house hunters again!  They are interested in doing it, but just not sure if we can take on the time that it takes to do the show. It was a lot of fun though and we need to see if it would be a fit again :-)

Day 2

My day went pretty well yesterday in looking at the different homes we had on our list.  This is pretty hard doing this by myself.  I really wish Bradden could have come with me, but was just too much work to find someone to help with our active kiddos.  So I had to try and take a bunch of pics and lots of notes for Bradden.  We felt pretty comfortable with the neighborhoods we looked at ahead of time so that piece was easy conveying to him what I saw.  It is hard though having to ultimately make this decision by myself.

In the end we came down to two houses:  1 is further from the kids schools, has more charm, is in a better neighborhood, has some work to do, will have more up keep, is cheaper in price.  The 2^nd one is closer to the schools, beaches, the downtown area, has awesome views from house to pool and lake,  is less up keep, smaller community, needs kitchen updated some, not a lot of charm and more money.  We literally couldn’t figure out which one we want.  So we flipped a coin.  Can you believe it we just chose our house off of a flipping a coin?  “Who does that”? We are putting in an offer this evening and will keep you updated on how we fair. You just never know the whole negotiating process and the inspection piece.  Ultimately I believe that either house would be very good for our family.  So we will see how this all shakes out!

I thought this was a really wonderful piece of advice.  I just saw this today and it really made a great topic of conversation between Bradden and I this morning.  Really hits true to what life is about.  NO idea why certain things happen or how come, just have to believe this is reason. That is how I feel about finding the “perfect” house for us.  What is meant to happen will happen!

God has a plan for us that we may not understand at the moment. As the day unfolds, however, we often come to see clearly His amazing grace. He tends to lead us on the paths we may never have journeyed on our own. 

— from Visiting Mary

On a completely different note, I am not sure I have ever actually slept alone in a house and last night I was pretty scared.  No idea why, but by midnight when I still hadn’t fallen asleep, I decided to get a knife and put next to my bed. I locked my bedroom door and barricaded it will blankets and easter eggs in case a crazy person tried to break in I would have time to hear them walk on the eggs and I could grab my knife.  Haha typing this sounds even worse then the fact that I did this.  WOW, I need to get out more!

The weather has been amazing the last two days and can really tell that I am not from around here.  At 9 am this morning I grabbed a cup of coffee and had to run a few errands. It was 80 degrees at this point and I have all the windows down in the car and am jamming out to music.  As I am at a stop light I am looking around and no one has their windows down, literally I start looking as I drive about 2 miles and not one car has their windows down. Apparently my excitement for the heat isn’t what everyone else feels.  Oh well for this very moment I am enjoying the heat and sun! Take it while I can.

Heading back to T-Town at 6am tomorrow.  Hope to know about the house piece  in the next few days as well as having our home inspection done this week. A lot of pieces are moving around in our game of life right now!

Xoxoxo

P.S. I have had a lot of people say they are jealous or wish they could do what we are doing.  I don’t have the magic answers, but what I do know if you truly want some type of change in your life whatever it might be big or small, try to make it happen. I realize not all things can happen for a person, but having some goals to try and make it happen are much more important, than wishing and wanting and it never happening. Great quote to ponder:

Until Next Time

It is really happening!

I thought since this adventure of ours it going to be really new, unique and exciting to us that I might go ahead and blog about what we are up to.  I figured Facebook friends might get an over load of what we are doing and up to.  Blogging is a great way for us to share what we are up to and how we are doing in this transition of ours. I had considered blogging this move of ours a few weeks ago and then was shown a really cool blog about a family that did something similar and felt "It is possible to blog this"!

One thing as I am typing this is I am not all that great at writing, grammar, punctuation, run on sentences etc.  Please know this if you decide to read up on what this "Crazy thing we are doing" you might be bothered on how bad of a writer I actually am.  Sorry ahead of time.

So this is pretty much in a nut shell how this all is going down!

My husband Bradden and I starting dating our Senior year of H.S. back in 1996.  He went to Southview and I went to Whitmer.  We actually went to the same Jr. High school and ran into each other through a mutual friend our summer going into our Senior year.  At first we started out as friends and then over time (not that long) we started dating.  So crazy how life is as I never would have thought I would have married a guy I was dating at age 17 and we would later have 3 wonderful children and a really loving marriage. 

So pretty much (and I only know this from looking through a bunch of photos as I have been packing) from the very beginning we have been doing and going to water related places.  Constantly finding water as part of our enjoyment.  I had been working at 5/3 Bank 4 years ago and kept hearing about how my clients were finding really good deals on FL properties and decided maybe we should look at getting one.  Bradden and I went down to Ft. Myers, FL in the hopes of finding a little piece of paradise. We chose Ft. Myers as we had honeymooned there and Naples, but also they have decent flights from Detroit.  

We were fortunate to find a great property down there and began heading down when we could. Our original thought was that we would have this sanctuary that we along with our friends/family could go to in the colder months and or for fun vacations.  The more often we went the more we didn't want to come home. What I think happened was that we weren't necessarily just on vacation when we went down there. We were actually living there. We go to the store, belong to the library, clean, do repairs around the house, make meals in the kitchen, all the things we do up here in Toledo.  Yes we do some of the touristy things, but really have began living in Florida.  Needless to say the anticipation of our next trip would weigh on us big time.  We count down the months/days.  Talk about it, plan for it and then getting very depressed when leaving there.  The last 3 times we went it was getting more and more difficult for us to come home.  We decided last year to begin looking into schools, neighborhoods and really trying to figure out the actual ins and outs of what a life could look like for us if we moved. The hard thing for us was Bradden had a job in Toledo and wow that sounded hard for him to find one in Florida.  Plus the grades that our children are in would be a difficult transition for them. We made a commitment to plan for when Madison graduated H.S. We felt this would be a good transition that we could get her down to a college in FL and then our son Blake would transition for his Freshmen year.  Even though we had this master plan we were still having the itch to get down there or when down there not wanting to leave. 

A pretty exciting thing happened for my husband in November of 2013.  He was offered a consulting job for a health care system out of New Jersey.  The job is partially remote from home and then the other part out in NJ.   This opened our discussion back up for possibly moving sooner than the 2017 timeframe.  The reason being is we don’t know what 3 years will look like.  It could be possible that Bradden’s consulting job could end and he would go back to position locally. Also what if Madison doesn’t’ t want to go to college in FL, or doesn’t want to home to us on her breaks as she wants to go back to Ottawa Hills to see al her H.S. friends?  Maybe Blake will not want to leave for his H.S. and to committed to his sports and we feel bad pulling him out? Also our baby will now be in 2^nd grade versus starting kindergarten down there?  Just a lot of decisions that we don’t know in 3 years that might prevent us from wanting/being able to move. 

We had our kids spring break planned in March to head down to Ft. Myers and our condo.  This was the VERY first time we were getting depressed about going for the knowledge of leaving! This had never happened before.  Mostly we just were giddy about going and then sad when leaving.  This trip we couldn’t stop talking about how we wanted to stay forever and how badly we wanted to do this. So we decided to line up a realtor to tour some neighborhoods/houses.  We also scheduled a tour of the high school we were considering.   We thought by gaining some of this information it would really help us in deciding if this is something we could do and wanted to do.  Along the way we had read some really good reviews on Naples and wanted to peak around there as well. We went for 2 days and enjoyed our time in Naples.  The thing though is we were so unfamiliar with Naples and felt like we were starting all over as far as figuring it out.  We decided even though Naples was awesome, that the place for us truly is Ft. Myers.  We were going all over the place, from neighborhoods, to types of houses, to our budget, to the schools, it was actually a pretty stressful vacation. There was fighting, crying, happiness, sadness, you name it.  Making this decision was so huge as it doesn’t just affect Bradden and I.  This is our children’s future and if we get it wrong, it ultimately can affect them. We actually had the High School tour scheduled on a Tuesday and I emailed the admission director and cancelled.  I just felt we were so all over the place and asking her to spend time with us wasn’t fair.  Come Wednesday though I thought if we don’t at least see it we will wonder about it and I should just do it while we are here.  So we rescheduled for Friday. In touring the H.S. both my two older kids (15,11) absolutely loved it.  WOW, just soo different.  Their lockers are in a hall way that doesn’t have a wall, so it is all exposed to the outside with a courtyard that goes up two stories.  So you can look over the half wall where your lockers are and look down into this courtyard with all these palm trees and benches.  Just so cool.  The school has so much to offer and I believe will be a great fit for our children. This made a huge impact in our decision because our two older kids were pretty excited about the school.  My daughter even said “I wish I didn’t have to like it so much”.   Knowing we had a plan for the school really helped us feel confident we can do this.

So we have the schools figured out, the neighborhoods we are interested in and feeling pretty good we can actually do this.  The next piece was finding out if Bradden’s job is ok with him now moving to FL. Even though it is remote, we just weren’t sure if it would make a difference or not. So Sunday night the last night we are in FL, my husband emails his recruiter to make sure this is ok.  We fly in Monday morning to Toledo and he has an email stating that absolutely this is the beauty of his job!  So now we had another plus in our favor! Ok so we are moving along, we actually say hmmmm to many positives working for us.  We both felt that it was really important to get our Toledo home right on the market for several reasons: for me it was to actually make us go through with the move, (I knew coming home and back to our life would make it much harder to actually move),  buying another house in FL, would be a lot easier if we knew our home was sold and the thought of leaving our house without being sold would make the transition much harder and we would question doing it.

So I took pics of our whole house and put it up for sale 4 hours after we arrived home on April 7^th!   By April 17^th we had an offer and a signed contract!  WOW we are really doing this!!  The family that is moving into our home seems amazing and it feels so good knowing a great family is moving into the home you completely and absolutely adore.  We have our inspection this Friday and I really hope it goes well!  You never know on this piece of the sale until it is done.

Ok so now we have our house sold, Bradden’s job is a go, Maddie has been accepted into her school and I am close to finishing up the boys school piece.  Awww all along these last weeks Bradden has been in New Jersey for 18 of the last 21 days, we had a huge benefit for our kids school, 2 Easter celebrations,  my daughter’s school musical and the start of baseball season.   I have been a hot mess!!!  But we are moving along!  I have been selling our life off! On a daily occurrence I have sold items on craigslist or Facebook, taking a ton of stuff to goodwill and packing 1-3 boxes.  So I am feeling really good about the process.  

Closing is supposed to happen on June 1^st with a move out date of June 22^nd.  Yikes, 2 months to go.  We will get there; I am trying to take one day at a time and not try to over think it. There are some days that I feel like I can’t think of one more thing and then I remind myself we are doing this to ourselves!  Self-inflicted pain and work! I keep reminding myself nothing in life worth having is easy.  TO be honest I can see why people don’t want change, change is hard.  It really is easier just to stay in what is comfortable.  There is Fear of the unknown, having to figure out all the moving pieces and wondering if it is a wrong decision.  I did have a friend tell me though that the great thing about decisions is if you make the wrong one you can just make another one.  On the opposite of that though some decisions are irreversible and you only get one chance to make the right one (lesson to be learned for teenagers and young adults) or anyone that doesn’t know this consequence :-)

So pretty much all of what I have said above leads me to today.  I am currently typing this on an airplane (sprit, who just got me really mad and made me pay for my purse because it didn’t fit in my free back pack-not sure if I am gonna fight this one or not) heading down to Florida to hopefully find a place for our family to call home!  Both Bradden and I wanted to do this together, but just felt it would be to hard to find someone to help with the kids and they have a lot going on in the next few days.  We have had in the last week or so some awesome houses we liked and just like that pending!! Grrrrr it has made us pretty upset.  So we are hoping of the 10 we have to look through we can find a contender. Our biggest challenge is finding one that is in a decent proximity to the kids schools.  Today we live in a community that our kids schools are all in walking distance. I realize we are in a unique situation, but am fearful it could be a huge adjustment if we move to a place that is 25 minutes away. The thing that we are struggling with is the newer homes in the more active family neighborhoods are further away.  Where as the homes closer to school are older, higher insurance (due to being closer to the water) and neighborhoods are not as active such as having pools, bball courts, tennis courts ( all the fun stuff of the newer communities).  We like both areas and just can’t figure out what makes the most sense for “our” family.

I think this is all I am going to write for this post.  This was a lot of typing, more than I expected.  This is going to be a really fun journal for me and hope that our kids will enjoy looking back at this and say “Wow, mom and dad took a chance and we sure had a great time”  Please note though we are having an extremely hard time leaving our family, friends and community.  This adjustment is and has been really hard on us. We continually are faced with another piece of what we are going to be missing.  I will probably do a separate post about this piece.  I think my next post will be how it went with the house hunt!- we might be on house hunters again as well :-) will definitely share this once we know for sure.

Until next time,

Xoxoxoxo

Jozsa Clan