An Overdue Update

A lot of exciting things have happened since March, and now that I (Katrina) am back in the good ol' U-S-of-A, updating our blog with something interesting is no longer the tedious job it once was. You see, the internet in Germany was very expensive, so their standard"high speed" internet took ages for us to upload pictures.

So yes, I am back in Washington. The last I reported, our remaining months in Germany were coming slowly to a close, and we were scheduled to be PCSing (Army lingo for moving) to Ft. Lewis, Washington sometime in the Summer of 2009. That time has now arrived!

On June 1st, Moroni and I kissed poor Donald goodbye and headed off to Seattle in hopes of securing housing before he accompanies us on July 8th. For the last 4 weeks and 3 days, that's what I've been doing. While Moroni has been enjoying unrestricted and unleashed access to a yard for the first time in his life, I've been hard at work! We submitted an offer on "our" home on June 7th and it was quickly accepted! Luckily, we were smart and had a home inspection done. The findings were crushing. Unnoticeable to the human eye, there was substantial was water damage beneath the bathrooms. Rather than giving the house up, we spent the next 3.5 weeks negotiating the repairs. It was a long road, but two days ago we came to a final agreement on all terms. Barring an unforeseen and unlikely catastrophes, the house will be ours. Or closing date is set for July 16th, but it's highly unlikely that the date will be met. An August closing is looking more realistic.


A bit about our home:

It's in the rural town of Yelm(by Roy and McKenna), which is about 45 minutes south of Federal Way, and is 15ish minutes south east of Fort Lewis. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, with a LOT of potential. It has 3 bedrooms, an office, a decently sized spare room/family room, and a small sun room. In total, it has 2150 square feet, which is a lot more than we expected to get on our budget. Built in 1979, it's not very regal or majestic looking, but it's very "us", and we love everything about it.
Okay, almost everything. It's brown, and a previous owner had the audacity to paint the exterior trim ROYAL BLUE. there must have been a very alluring sale on ROYAL BLUE paint, because nothing else could justify such horror.

Don't worry, folks, white paint will be our first home-related purchase. When people pull into our drive way, I don't want a visual assault of ROYAL BLUE to be the first thing they experience.

It's a rambler, which I love. They can be harder to find in the Pacific Northwest than other places, so we lucked out. I didn't always like ramblers, but time has changed me. Part of that is because we love giant breed dogs. Due to potential joint problems, they're not supposed to go down stairs during their 1st year of life.
Ask me how much I loved carrying a 50 pound puppy down the stairs every day... Yeah. Glad we got a rambler!

Our other favorite thing about it? It's on acreage! Well, technically. It's on a 1.21 acre parcel, so we can honestly toss the term acreage around without lying, lol.


It totally has a hot tub. Big bonus.

The two-car garage is detached. Kinda odd, but it's an old house. We're coping.

A couple pictures, for your viewing pleasure:




living room


hallway leading to bedrooms




back deck & hot tub






back deck & hot tub (notice the lovely ROYAL BLUE trim)



back yard




When I initially went house-hunting and viewed this one, I took heaps of pictures. What I didn't take was an exterior picture of the house from the front. Why? Well, because I was taking the pictures for Donald to check out, I knew he would already have a picture of the outside from the MLS listing online. Silly me, I didn't think ahead. When our offer was accepted, the MLS listing came down, and the pictures went with it.


Here, however, is a short video-clip I took of the outside for him:




We're very excited to be home owners. I can speak for both of us when I say that Heavenly Father has really blessed us with this house. We got a fantastic deal, and if it's the place that He wants us to be, then everything will go as it should and the house will close when it needs to. If something goes wrong, then it wasn't meant to be.


On an unrelated note:
Donald comes home in FOUR DAYS. He was lucky enough to go to Prague with some friends of ours yesterday (I'm way jealous!), so when he gets home I'll upload the pictures from his trip.


Life is good!