Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I want to blog about our house! This is more for the benefit of my "in real life" friends and family, but hopefully you'll enjoy it too! We live in Raleigh right now, and the house we are buying is in Garner. We settled on Garner because it seemed we had two choices. North Raleigh where we could afford a newer house, but in slightly undesirable, very congested areas with teensy yards OR Garner in more desirable areas with more normal sized yards but old ranch style houses. We were more drawn to Garner because it felt like a slice of small town, and we knew we wanted a yard big enough for kids to play in. Then we happened upon this house... in Garner, cute neighborhood, newer house, decent sized yard (.21 of an acre which for our area is actually pretty nice! Yards are generally postage stamps here.). We somehow found the only short sale in the world that doesn't take months just to get a response. In fact, it took them about 6 hours!
Though it took me a while to be ok with not living in Raleigh, Garner is sort of the best of both worlds for us. It's pretty much the closest 'burb of Raleigh (10-15 minutes to downtown Raleigh where we go to church) and doesn't feel detached from Raleigh by the beltline or the interstate like most of the other 'burbs here. But where we will live is on the edge of some idyllic country looking land, very close to multiple shopping centers, and and it feels like there is more room to spread out. We have everything we like in Raleigh just 15 minutes away, but less traffic and a slower paced area. I don't think we could have asked for more. Except maybe a way higher budget in which we could have opened up our Raleigh options. But I digress.
The house is moments from: a Catholic church (in case we decide to switch, but we do love us some Cathedral), two Chickfilas, two Targets, Michael's, 4 parks, a rec center with all kinds of free and super cheap classes for all ages, a performing arts center, sweet little downtown Garner, and a library. Obviously there is more stuff, but those are the things that are really close by that excite me the most. The rec center and two of the parks are less than a mile from the house!
I get a big fat "F" on pictures because between Steven and the appraisal person, hardly any of the pictures are what I consider blog worthy lol. I should have done them myself but I was too busy imagining living there to focus on picture taking! Steven took super random pictures like a close up of appliances (gotta love him), and the appraisal pictures were all sort of blurry. The house is about 1350 sq feet, split bedroom floor plan (two bedrooms and a bathroom on the left, living room in the middle with kitchen behind it, and master with bathroom on the right). Here are a few I scraped together:
We picked paint colors! I kid you not, that was possibly more stressful than most of the wedding decisions we made! I know it's paint and paint can be changed, but paint is also expensive and time consuming so we didn't want to regret any choices right away. The guest room/movie room will be a pale yellow. That way we can break Steven's projector back out of the box without the wall color affecting the picture too much, and it'll be neutral for when we need it as a kid's bedroom.The baby room (don't get any ideas, we just don't want to have to paint it again any time soon so it's officially been dubbed the baby room) will be sort of a light/sage type green because we don't want to find out the gender whenever we do start a family. The living room will have 3 beige walls and the wall with the fireplace will be sort of a clover green (why yes, I do like green), and the kitchen and bedroom will both be beige. I know it sounds like a lot of beige, but that way I can redecorate as often as I want without the walls no longer matching. Our apartment now is 100% beige and I actually kind of like it... it feels warm and cozy. Plus you can see the kitchen, bedroom, and living room all from each other so if they were colors they would have to be complementary... and that got stressful to think about! I had settled on a purple accent wall in the living room for a while but ended up going with the green instead. I reserve the right to change my mind before the paint is purchased.
The neighborhood is pretty cute. It's hard to explain but there's a neighborhood that has been around for quite a while, probably since the 60's, that flows into a newer neighborhood. Then our neighborhood is down a road off of that newer one, and is the newest (our house was built in 2006). It's clearly a different neighborhood from the middle one, which is good because that one isn't taken care of that well. It's not terrible, but there are few houses and yards that really need some love. Our neighborhood appears to be well maintained. It's only got 47 houses, has sidewalks, cute little street signs and lots of street lights. We are SO excited for June 11th to roll around so we can be homeowners! We will still have our apartment through the end of September, so we can take our time painting and moving... but I will be itching to move in!
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