Catch up time!! Driving to Alberta, hanging out with my family

Well, I think going 5 weeks+ in between posts is a record for me, but I have good reasons for being so far behind! July has been beyond insane! I will do separate posts for all the different events we had going on the last month or so, that way nothing gets lost in an ages long post.

First: trip to Alberta! We drove up to Salmon Arm Tuesday, June 28th and stayed with my childhood friend Kendra over night. How incredibly fun to catch up with her and meet her family! She has older boys (youngest is Lynsey's age) but somehow they all got along really well! The older boys were really good with Nathan, and they had a dog which really helped:). Wednesday we were off to Calgary! We got to see Terry and Marilyn's family that night which was so great. Brian's Grandma Kroeker had passed away in Manitoba earlier in the week, so everyone was off to Manitoba by Thursday, so we mostly hung out with friends on Thursday. Friday morning we were off to the family campout! Brian stayed for Friday and left very early Saturday morning to go to the Calgary airport (he flew to Winnipeg for his Grandma's funeral, came back Sunday). The family campout was a lot of fun. The kids had a great time with their cousins! There was a playground really close by so they could walk back and forth (great for Adam) and there were so really fun activities for Lynsey (the zipline was her favorite!). Sunday we were off to Three Hills. We stayed with Mary and Dave, but hung out with Gert and Liz as well - my parents also came out there so we could spend a little extra time with them, too. Wonderful time catching up with my family!

Monday we were off to Edmonton! We took it easy for the next day or two to wind down from all the travelling from one place to another, and then Brian and I got to go to Montreal - next post!

Summer fun, mixed with a bit of stress:-/

And just like that, June is half over! What! We had a little bit of calm time after we got the house. I got caught up on some much needed sleep, life just calmed down a bit. Nathan and I went to Lynsey's field day at school which was really fun! I mentally prepared myself to start packing . . . and then delayed starting . . . I did eventually start, but not before some stress started! So our landlord listed the house for rental, and she had a few people come through last Saturday. While she was doing this, we were at the Pacific Science Center having a lovely morning! We saw the exhibits and went to see the special Lego art exhibit, The Art of the Brick. It was very cool! Unfortunately Adam was done by this point and didn't want to see it, so Brian and I had to split up a bit so we could both see the exhibit. Before we left the house in the morning, I had been running around picking up toys and clothes, just trying to make the house not look messy for the landlord to show it. Later that day, she texted and asked us to show the house to someone on Monday. I actually ended up showing it myself on Sunday night, not so much as a thank you from her. On Monday morning, we woke up to a nasty email from her about how the house was the messiest and dirtiest she has ever seen it. She was "shocked" by it. Ugh, I hate confrontation. Brian responded in a mature way, she slightly lightened up in her response, but she continued to be condescending and insulting. I'm sorry that the house isn't spotless, but I am starting to pack now and it isn't going to get any better! I couldn't believe her nerve! I would never talk to my tenants that way, how do you know that they won't retaliate by leaving the house in much WORSE shape for the next showing?? Believe me, I am tempted! I won't though, because I have nothing to gain by escalating this fight with her. Thankfully, her ad is terrible and not even searchable on Craigs List, so we have had no more showings since then. I would tell her, but she doesn't seem to welcome or be grateful for our help, and my motivation to go out of our way to help her has dwindled down to zilch. We have told her on several occasions that we will clean the house back to original condition when we move out, but that doesn't seem to be good enough for her. She has no leverage to force us to live a certain way while we are still renting it. She is just being a bully, and it took me a few days to stop being bothered by it. Thankfully (or not!) we had some bigger issues come up on Tuesday so the landlord problem became small potatoes!

When we bought the house, we had to waive all conditions in order for the seller to accept our offer, including the appraisal condition. What that means is that when the bank sent an appraiser, we had to hope to high heaven that he appraised the house for close to the amount that we paid for it, because the bank will only loan us the amount of the appraisal. Our realtors told us that in this market there was a time earlier on in the year where low appraisals were a problem because they just hadn't caught up to how fast the market was moving, but that it hadn't been such a big problem recently. Well, if something can go wrong, it will! The appraisal came in low. Really low. Yikes! That meant that we had to scramble to come up with the extra money, while still appealing the appraisal and hoping they would see sense. What a frustrating experience. We pleaded our case for why our house was worth what we paid, and gave some really good evidence, but it was kind of too late at that point. Appraisers are not going to drastically change their decision, that makes it look like they did a shoddy job the first time (which this guy definitely did! He didn't even give our house "points" for being on a dead end street, and we are on a private drive shared with a few other houses! That is BETTER than a dead end street!). They did raise it up $5K which helped us out a bit, and the sellers actually came down in price $4500 which they really didn't have to do - it was a really nice gesture on their part. We had no leverage at all to make them feel like they had to do it. I guess some sellers out there do have a heart! This stress on top of a misunderstanding about the mortgage rate that we got has made for an extremely stressful week. Thankfully, we were able to get most of it squared away yesterday and it's looking like things will work out okay for closing on Friday. I just don't remember worrying about any of this stuff when we bought our houses in Calgary - miss the simplicity of the Canadian house buying process! It will all be over soon, and then we get to fight with our crazy landlord to get our damage deposit back. Good times! Soooo thankful to be done with renting, it is definitely not for me!!

Our kids have been doing pretty well! Adam has been really mellow lately with only a few exceptions - I hope he handles the move well! Lynsey is a bit sad sometimes when we talk about the move, but overall I think she is handling the impending change really well. I am proud of her for looking at the positives and seeing that there is hope:). I know she will love it, it will just take some time. Lynsey finished school on Wednesday and we are gearing up for not only our big move, but also our trip to Alberta coming up in a week and a half. Hopefully we can be organized for both! I am trying not to feel overwhelmed, and just taking the packing one day at a time. Today my goal is to pack 10 boxes - I have already done 2, so just 8 more to go! Maybe I'll lower my goal to 8 . . . it depends on how we do in the office today:-/. Wish us luck in this crazy time!

The Kroekers bought a house!

So we've had an eventful May! To finish what I started in the last blog post, we all survived Brian's trip just fine - Adam continued to be as mellow as ever! Praise the Lord! Brian had a great time out there, he can do his own blog post with his pictures and experiences if he so desires (I challenge you, dear!:)). After he got back, our feet hit the pavement and an aggressive house hunt began. We had found out that our landlord was not willing to sell us the house we are now in, and we just felt more sure than ever that we wanted to stay relatively long term (more than only one or two more years anyway) and just didn't want to deal with the headache of renting any longer. Also, there haven't been any signs that the housing market is letting up at all so now is as good a time as any to dive in! I had found a house that I liked while Brian was away, so the same day Brian came back from London, we had to go look at this house. Brian was tired, jet-lagged, and not very enthused about the location of the house (it was in the Education Hill neighborhood which was a bit further north than we ideally wanted to go, and Lynsey would have had to go to a new school). It was an older house that had been remodeled, and of course they didn't do everything we would have done (why doesn't everyone think the way we do when they refinish their houses! Very annoying!:-S). I thought it was a fine house, not perfect, but would work very well for us. So we tried to buy it (even though Brian definitely had some misgivings). We waited around on the day they were reviewing offers wondering what was going on (seriously, how long can it take to look at 5 or 6 offers and pick the best one? I would think this would be a fairly straight-forward process in most cases!). Well, apparently this Realtor was at a lacrosse game and not actually in direct contact with his clients, so we had the joy of wasting an entire evening wondering if we had actually got the house. The Realtor did at one point reach out to our Realtor and ask if we wanted to up our offer a bit to match a different offer that had no contingencies, so we did plus a bit more (wish we hadn't bothered, we probably just bid up the other buyer that they were always intending to go with anyway!!). A few hours after that call, we finally got the final word that they had gone with the other offer. I was so upset by the time they called that I was ready to pull our offer anyway. Just because it's a seller's market does not mean you have to be inconsiderate jerks to buyers. We have wasted so much time (and money on pre-inspections) on houses that we haven't been able to buy that at that point, I wasn't sure if my emotions could handle another house! We did regroup and carry on, thankfully:). Just wasn't the right house, I guess!

We kept an eye on listings popping up that week, and lo and behold, a house just down the street from us came up last Thursday! Could this be the reason that we have been getting stymied at every turn?? Perhaps we were meant to stay in our neighborhood after all! We went to look at it, and even though it only had 3 bedrooms up (it did have a den on the main floor, but only a half bath down there), we decided we could make it work. It was very nicely finished, our lives could stay the same, we would just be a few blocks down the road. We were going to Victoria for the weekend, which was actually a really nice distraction from obsessing about the house, so we planned to do the pre-inspection on Monday morning and away we went to Victoria!

We had a great time in Victoria! We took the Bainbridge ferry and then then Blackball ferry from Port Angeles on the way there, so that was really nice! Brian's parents came to our room Friday evening and we hung out with them, took the kids swimming. The next day, we went to James and Sarah's house for the morning and early afternoon - great to see them again! We took the kids swimming again in the afternoon and the kids had a great time! Brian's parents came over around dinner time and Brian and I got to go downtown to Il Terrazzo for dinner, most delicious restaurant ever! We love that place! We had a nice leisurely walk by the harbor on the way back to the hotel, it was a lovely evening! The next morning, James and Sarah joined us at the hotel for some swimming in the morning. Something super cool happened while we were in the pool! Adam had been getting more and more comfortable with jumping into the shallow end of the pool as the weekend went on, and on Sunday, he decided he didn't want Brian to catch him in the deep end! He jumped in, doggy paddled to the end, hoisted himself out, and went again! He did this over and over again until he got tired- amazing! We are so proud of him for going out of his comfort zone! I can't believe he knows how to doggy paddle - hopefully his swimming will really accelerate now that he knows he can stay afloat and propel himself:). Such a cool surprise! After swimming, we checked out and had a nice lunch with Brian's parents before heading out to Shwartz Bay to catch the ferry to Tswassen. The trip home went really well, loving those Nexus passes! Blew by a 30 minute wait at the border, and all the guy asked was if we had 5 people (we had scanned our cards so he knew how many of us there should be), we said yes, and he told us to have a nice day! That was it! Best border crossing ever, why didn't we do it sooner?? A very nice weekend over all!

Back to the house hunt! We submitted our offer Monday evening and waited . . . and waited . . . to hear if we got the house. An hour doesn't sound very long, but if you are imagining people sitting down with a handful of offers and you aren't hearing anything for over an hour, you are definitely imagining at this point that they have definitely called someone else and are negotiating with them. This was so painful, as we had gone all out on this offer - waiving everything (should have really done that from the start of this house hunt, enough people are doing it that you won't get a house unless you do, too), high earnest money, really high top bid (like we were stretching as far as we possibly could, this was our very best shot!). Finally our Realtor called and said they weren't actually reviewing offers until the NEXT DAY! Ugh! Oh well, at least we didn't have to agonize anymore about why they weren't calling us! At that time their Realtor told our Realtor that there were 7 offers, 3 that were contenders, and ours was one of the top three - it was "phenomenal" he said. We were definitely hopeful, although a bit depressed that we weren't a clear winner because we didn't really know what that meant, but we had a great chance we thought! The next morning, they were supposed to decide by noon. I went to the gym in the morning, hoping to distract myself, but I was so tense, checking my phone after every song. By noon we had not heard anything. I got our Realtor to check with them to see how things were coming along, and finally just after 1, we heard the devastating news that they had gone with another offer:-(. Someone had offered almost the same amount as us ($5000 less actually) but all cash. What?? We were heart broken. We can't compete with cash offers! It was such a hard knock, we were both pretty sure this was the one.

Time to regroup again! I did this a bit faster than Brian, I am so task-oriented with my eye on the prize that I only allowed myself about 15 minutes of grieving before moving on! On Monday afternoon, we had gone to look at a great house in Education Hill with a huge yard on a really quiet street. There were tenants in there, so there were boxes everywhere (it was awkward going to look at it, as she was there and told us they didn't want to leave but they had to - I was like, "sorry!" Super awkward!). Anyway, at the time that we looked at it on Monday, I liked it, but I was pretty sure we were going to get this other house on our street so I didn't look too closely or imagine ourselves in this house too much. So Tuesday, after getting this news that we didn't get the house on our street, I asked to go see this Ed Hill house again. Thankfully we were able to get in to see it on really short notice, and I really liked it this time. Not perfect of course, but I saw a lot of potential and really thought it could work well for us. They were reviewing offers the next day so not a lot of time to think it through. They also weren't allowing showings in the evening, so Brian couldn't go see it that night. It was on me to decide if we wanted to book the pre-inspection for the next morning, at which time Brian could look at it again. So I made the executive decision to go for it. Brian wasn't completely enthused because he was still so disappointed about giving up on the house in the location that we really wanted, but he was able to put those emotions aside and we put a strong offer on this house. They were reviewing offers at 6 that same evening. Again, 7pm rolls around and we were like, "here we go again!". Our Realtor called their Realtor at one point and got a very strange response, that they hadn't decided and she had to go. At this point, we are thinking that they are probably talking to another Realtor trying to get their client to up their offer to match ours. We have been competing against so many people that have either all cash or 50% down, it was just the first thing that popped into our mind. At this point we are talking about pulling our offer because we are not interested in helping inflate housing prices while never actually getting a house ourselves. I was literally ready to crack - if we didn't get this house, we were just going to rent. We had spent over $1200 this spring on pre-inspections, Brian had taken many hours off work to go to these pre-inspections, never mind the incredible amount of time and emotional energy that we had invested falling in love with houses for days only to have them ripped away. Yep, renting was just fine!

At 8pm, my phone rings, and it's our Realtor - we got the house!! There were six other offers that were pretty similarly priced, but ours was the best! And it didn't go as high as we thought it might (still higher than we want obviously, but we had resigned ourselves long ago to the fact that if we wanted a house, we were going to have to make ourselves sick trying to get it!). Hallelujah! We are now in the process of getting the loan started, and all being well, we should take possession on June 24th. Here is the link to the house if anyone is interested - there are a few different sets of pictures taken from different listings on this site:

http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/17609-NE-101-ST-Crt-Redmond-WA-98052_rb/?fromHomePage=true&shouldFireSellPageImplicitClaimGA=false&fromHomePageTab=buy

What an ordeal! So thankful it is over! We will probably do some painting before we move in, and won't move in until mid-July or so. We have a trip to Alberta planned for the end of June, and moving in before just sounded like it was going to be too stressful. I can't believe I'm moving again. This better be the last time in a long time! I do know enough to never say never though, and God has a way of interrupting your best laid plans, so I guess we will see! A good excuse to do some more purging:).

Wish us luck!

2 days down, 8 to go!

What is this countdown about you ask? Brian is in London and will be back in 8 days (but who's counting!). So far, things have gone very well. We have down our best to prepare the kids (especially Adam) for how long he will be gone, and I THINK it's working! I know it's only been a few days and he might get tired of waiting for Dad to come home, but there is a trip to Victoria coming up that he is talking a lot about (Victoria Day weekend) and I think having that to look forward to is helping! Bedtime has been going smoothly, he sees the car at home and talks about it, and I keep reminding him that even though the car is home, Dad is still on his work trip, and for now he is accepting that. It's too much to hope for maybe that this will continue, but I have to say that it's been pretty easy so far! I got the neighbor girl to babysit this morning and went to the Free Them 5K in Shoreline this morning which was fun, and it all went off without a hitch! I made up a calendar with all the events in May so I keep showing it to all the kids so they can have a visual, really seems to be helping. We'll see how optimistic I am sounding in a week! Wish me luck:).

I joined a different gym this week, so that's new for me. This gym has way more classes, so I can be a lot more flexible about when I go. The 24 Hour Fitness was not adding any classes, and in fact were dropping existing classes and changing them so much that it was just becoming really frustrating. This new gym even has Hot Yoga included in the membership which is really cool! I just have to convince my friends from 24 Hour to move over, too, I will miss the socializing after working out.

What else is new . . . not a whole lot! Oh, I guess I could report that we tried to buy a house a week and a half ago (try being the operative word). It's such a difficult process, because even though you KNOW there is a strong chance you won't get a house, it's impossible to go through the process of getting it pre-inspected and then writing an offer without investing yourself in it. Brian was thinking about all the things he would do to fix it up (not that it needed much fixing up, it was very nicely redone) and I was imagining where the furniture would go, what we do in the yard . . . you just can't put an offer on a house without getting invested in it. To top it all off, we were putting in what we thought was a very strong offer - we were offering 10% over asking price with few contingencies! All the comparable solds in the area seem to indicate that this was going to be more than enough to get the house, I have to admit I really thought we would get it. I had even connected with the owner on Facebook because she shared the listing on one of my groups! She was very sweet and I know that both her and the Realtor were rooting for us to get it! Well, I guess even when everything seems to fall in place, there can always be a hitch. Someone went crazy and bid 15% over asking. As much as these people wanted to sell us the house, money talks as we all know. I couldn't believe it, it was really hard. Both Brian and I were pretty down about it for a few reasons, not the least of which was if THAT house was going for THAT much, it would seem that we are rapidly being priced out of our first choice area to buy:(. I have to say that I haven't really felt like a little fish in a big pond until this experience. Nobody made me feel this way, but I couldn't help but feel like the world is looking at us like, "How cute, they were trying to buy a house! Awww, nice try guys!" I know it's not just us that is experiencing this madness, and this isn't a logical feeling, but it was definitely how I felt for a few days, very inferior and small. We have recovered now and are soldiering on, but the market conditions for buyers are just ridiculous. I feel like the door has been continually closing on us buying a house here, and while I don't understand why at this point in time, I know that we just need to keep trusting that God knows what's up and we'll figure this out! We are just going to keep looking and if we don't find something, we keep renting this house and see how we feel next Spring about trying to buy again! Not time to give up yet, our landlord has told us we basically have until the end of August and then we need to either sign another lease or be gone. We'll see how it goes from here on in!