March Adventures

We got busy starting in March so now that life has settled down a little it's time to start updating the blog.

Gru the Subaru!

In March, Guy and I started to start making grown up decisions. The first thing we did was retire the 95 Saturn. Saty was getting tired of keeping up with us. We had been looking at replacing her for a while and in the middle of March we purchased a 2014 Subaru Legacy. We've named him Gru. Guy was sad to be getting rid of the Saturn since we had her for so long. However, we were both ready to be in a car that was more comfortable to ride in, that had AC and where you could have a conversation with someone. We put Gru to the test and about 5 days after getting him we drove to Texas and started the house hunting
adventure.

Saying goodbye to the Saturn

It's about 10 hours of driving time to get to Texas. We left the Saturday of Spring Break to spend a week looking for houses and to get to know the area. When we got to Texas we found out that city of Paris was under a boil order for the next 48 hours. The hotel we were staying in didn't have any complementary bottles of water. After checking in we immediately went to dinner and to Walmart to try and get some bottled water. We got sparkling water because they were all out of regular bottled water. (go figure). Luckily we had a little left over regular water with us from Ames so we used that for teeth brushing and made due with the sparkling water for the next few days. We were grateful when the hotel finally had bottled water and really grateful when the boil order was lifted.

On Sunday we were able to go to church in what would be our new Ward (congregation). All of the people were super friendly! Guy and I are one of the few younger families in the ward. Luckily the company he is working for has a lot of younger engineers in it so we still have people in our age group and demographic. That afternoon we went out with our agent Karen Marsh, to go and look at houses. We saw 3 houses. The first one we looked at, the owners didn't know that we were coming so they were still home at the time. It needed a little work but the house was cute. It has tile in all of the bedrooms which Guy and I weren't way wild about. We also found out from our agent that house has has flood damage in the past. It was a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom. The second house we looked at was 4 bedroom, 2 bath. It had a really open look to the house. There was a lot of natural light in it. They had also removed one of the walls to open the kitchen up and make it similar to an "Arizona Great room". We were really impressed with the house. The yard also had a lot of landscaping around the front of the house. We were pretty impressed. The 3rd house we looked at was just outside of Paris in a town called Reno. Square footage wise, I think it was probably smaller than the 2nd one we looked at. It was however a newer home (built in 2007). It was a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom. We pretty much fell in love with it immediately. It was a little smaller but nicer than the other houses we had looked at. The house was just down the road from a different house we had liked online. The inside of the house didn't need too much work since it was newer. It does however need to have some landscaping done to it. There isn't really a lawn to speak of. And we would probably plant a few more flowers around the front and the back. We also would need to put in a patio or something because once the foundation ends that's all there is. We loved it though. We immediately felt like it was the house for us! There were 4 other couples that looked at the house the same day we did. We had our agent begin the paperwork that night. Guy and I went back to our hotel to talk about it and pray about it. We decided that if we still felt right about it in the morning then we would go and talk to our agent and see what all we needed to do to start the process.

The house we bought :)

The following morning we went and told our agent we were interested in the house and that we would like to make an offer. She started the paperwork and Guy and I paid the first initial payment. That afternoon we got a call from the agent that the sellers countered on our offer. Knowing that if we waited much longer we could face a bidding war we decided to accept the counter offer. By Tuesday of that week we had officially begun the "sale pending." We're grateful to have found the house at the beginning of the week because we were able to schedule the inspection and be there in person for it.

We spent the rest of the week doing different things in Paris. We hiked a different part of the Trail de Paris each night. We went hiking around the Lake one day. We saw the movie Zootopia. We are at different restaurants in the city. I think my favorite place was a place called 107. The hours are kind of odd but the place is pretty cool. It's located in an old burned down building. So there's no roof in the place but the food was amazing! We also tried a pretty good BBQ place. We did learn though not to eat the sausage from the place. It sits pretty heavy...

We're looking forward to living in the area. We'll post pictures of the house a little later this summer.