Taking a step forward

So, as I talked about yesterday, The Dude and I are *thinking* about moving in together. It's still a new-ish idea for both of us, but we've talked about it a lot over the past few months - just not as seriously as we are now. There are so many reasons why we should (and I'm not going to go into a lot of those for personal reasons) but we really haven't come up with any reasons why we shouldn't.

While I was playing around online last night, I decided out of curiosity to look and see if there were any houses for rent that would suit us in the town that we want to eventually move to. While I was scrolling through some listings, I stumbled upon an image that I immediately recognized.

There's this house - I was in it years ago (probably 10 or more years, honestly) and I loved it then. I've driven past it a million times since, and I still love the house.

And it's for sale.

I clicked on the listing and started reading the description. Four bedrooms, three full bathrooms, fully remodeled, 2 car garage, huge corner lot, new roof, new this, new that, and a small one bedroom with one bathroom house on the same property. I looked at the price and thought "huh. I wonder....."

After I picked my jaw up off of my desk, I sent the link to The Dude, who had already gone to bed. He got up sometime later and shot me a message.

"well, should we look into this, it's exactly what we're talking about."

So we drove out there today, just to take a look. He loved it from the outside as much as I did. So, we called the number on the sign. The owner answered, and said that he could be there in 30 minutes to show us the inside.

Why not?

We took the boys to a local park and played around for a while until he got there with his wife, and we went inside. The house is amazing. They have done a ton of work remodeling it, and it's really close to perfect for us. The only real downfall that I saw immediately is that one of the upstairs bedrooms doesn't have a closet - but there's enough room that we could put an armoire or a wardrobe or something in there for whichever kid landed in that room if we were to get the house. We looked at the little house too (someone's living there at the moment) and it was just absolutely adorable, and would be a perfect place for The Dude's mother to live.

So....we took a step. We looked. We liked. We went back to the hospital and showed The Dude's mom the pictures that we had taken and talked to her about it. We know that realistically, financing is going to be an issue - we don't have stellar credit, but our current income is good.

At this point, we're looking at it like this: we're going to look into the financing and see what we can get, if anything. If we can get it, we get it. If we don't, we're no worse off than where we are right now and we maintain status quo. I just can't help but think that there's a reason why I stumbled on to this particular house right at this moment in time - it could be a fluke, it could be coincidence, or it could be some kind of a sign. Who knows? We figure if we don't get this house, we'll keep looking - the right house is out there somewhere, and if we don't find it right away, we'll be ok. We're not going to find a house for the sake of finding a house, and we're not going to settle for something that isn't perfect for us - so when the time is right, the right house will appear and we will get it. It could happen really fast - or it might not.

Oh - and just to add to all of the perks of this house - it's about 4 blocks from where the kids would go to school, and (this could be good or bad) it's about 4 blocks from Ex1's house - so the older three kids could realistically just run back and forth between houses with a bit more freedom, rather than being (what they perceive as) "stuck" at one house or the other.

So....we'll see. No decisions have been made yet. We're ok with whatever direction this happens to take. One day, one step at a time.

We'll see what happens.

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Here, for your enjoyment...some pictures from our outing at the park while we were waiting to go look at the house.

Perhaps the least flattering picture of me ever posted...