I'm Back! Or At Least I am Trying to Be

A lot of things have happened in our family recently. A LOT. Good things. Bad things. All sorts of things. Here is a summary that is as brief as I can manage. It is something that I may or may not try to expand in later posts.

I guess that the biggest thing of all is that my husband Marc quit one job and got another. In a different town. For those of you that know us, we have moved a few times since we have been married, all in-state. My friend Val calls it our "tour of Utah". Twice in Logan to different apartments, then to St. George for an internship, then to Duchesne for a brief stressful job, then to Price to get into banking. Now we have moved to Roosevelt for a job at a credit union, which was Marc's main goal and interest all this time.

Great news, right? Well, yes, it was. Then came the over-the-top stress overload that was trying to find a place to live. I thought that we would just find a place to rent and move at the beginning of October. I was so wrong. There were hardly any rentals, all teeny or exorbitantly expensive. One gorgeous place we looked at leased for 1400 a month. I kid you not. That is like a mortgage! And more than people I know that are paying mortgages. Apparently there is a shortage of places to rent and buy because of the oil boom in the area, which has driven prices way up. We finally had to realize that we couldn't afford to rent, but could afford to buy. What a strange situation! I had not even considered buying a home. I didn't feel ready. It was too much of a grown-up old person thing to do!

We started looking at homes before we knew our exact price limit. BIG MISTAKE. I saw places that I loved that we couldn't afford. We even put an offer on one. Even with Marc's experience with housing counseling at USU, we didn't know quite what we were doing.When we found out what we could afford, it was a bit less than we were expecting. It was mostly because Marc had barely been hired, he hadn't worked long enough for the credit union to qualify for what he technically could afford with his income. I never could have guessed that would only be the first in a long line of disappointments. 

We found a nice town home in Vernal, which is 25 minutes away. I felt less rushed into being a homeowner with something that could be re-sold easily. A week away from closing, the seller backed out. He decided on the advice of a friend that he would wait a year for the property to be worth more. Then we tried another town home. It was bought from under us by someone willing to pay cash for it. I looked at some pretty icky places after that, feeling more desperate. Nothing impressed me. 

Then I found it. The one. A beautiful condo came on the market one day and we were the first to look at it. I loved everything about it. The neighborhood, the decor, the amount of bedrooms, everything. I put an offer on it on the spot. A few days later it turned out that the seller owed more than they thought they did, so they had to raise the price. This put the condo 15,000 out of our price range. 

I started really getting desperate. I had Marc look at places that I had never considered before. really cheap places. I started to joke about buying a place to turn into a rental property. Except it wasn't funny. It was real. It crushed me to think that I was going to live in a place far from what I had imagined for my first home. Finally Marc looked at a place and felt that it was the right thing to do. He knew that I would be disappointed and upset, but he knew it was the solution for us. I had never seen it myself, but I decided to trust his judgement. We put an offer on the property. 

Our offer was accepted quickly and gratefully by the little old widow that lived there. She wanted to sell her home and move to Arizona as soon as possible. We we happy with that idea. The next thing to happen was that we had to get approved for a different type of loan because the home is a modular home. Between this and other things, it took another month for things to go through. 

By the end, Marc had been away from us except for weekends for a little more than three (3!) months. The longer all of this took, the more I just wanted to be together again as a family. I literally wanted to be home for Christmas. And it almost didn't happen. We closed on the home on Thursday. Our paperwork didn't make it to FedEx pick-up deadline. We were told that we would have to wait for it to be sent the next day, and our loan to post on Monday, Christmas Eve. After some heroics by our amazing real estate agent, a digital copy was sent that allowed everything to go through that next morning. We got the keys at last.

Marc was living with his aunt while we were still in Price. That meant that the single parent weeks and whirlwind weekends wore me down, just as much as the near return to bachelorhood wore Marc down. I had no idea that things would take so long, so I never really asked anyone for help. I went weeks and weeks with no car and little interaction with the world outside of our home. I felt so alone, isolated, and depressed. It is funny, but it feels like I am coming back from being away for a long, long, time. 

Along with my new years resolution to write posts on this blog to keep everyone updated on our lives and record memories, I think that returning to writing after neglecting it since I graduated college 4 1/2 years ago will help me come back a little bit more each time. I hope that some of you out there are still there to take this ride with me.