How we got here......!

Hi guys! Welcome to our blog where you can read about the progress of our house hunting and, maybe even our remodel..if this current deal goes through... house 6. (sigh)

I created this blog for a couple of reasons. I know everyone wants to know what is going on (and why it's taking SO long!?). It's hard to remember who I've updated and I thought if you could visit us here and read at your leisure, you could find out what's up and I can stop repeating myself LOL! But the main reason I created this blog is for the remodel that we'll be going through if the house we have the current offer on, goes through.

Most of you know how we've gotten to this point, but some don't so I'll try to explain. The Air Force base is close enough to 2 towns (Santa Maria and Lompoc), to consider living at each. We chose Santa Maria (SM) initially b/c it's larger with a lot more 'stuff'....which to me, means a MALL, toy stores for the kids, restaurants, movie theater, etc. It would have been a 25-30 min drive for Charles every day to work though. And, well....he used THIS reason to buy a motorcycle to save on gas (mmmmmm hmmmmmmm). I agreed, for this reason, and b/c it makes him so happy...aww, such a good wife. Anyway, we thought it was worth the drive for him to be closer to the fun stuff AND my assemblies (in the same city). Thennnnnnn, gas prices went insane......

So, the first FIVE houses we looked at were in Santa Maria. Some were 'short sales', some were already foreclosed. And house #5 I was droooooling over, only b/c it has an open floor plan and a large kitchen. Here are the houses we considered seriously or made offers on:


While still in Cheyenne, Charles came out to look around and we made an offer on this house. It didn't go through b/c it was a short sale and it would have taken 3 months to finish up the deal and we said we didn't have that kind of time. HA! Yeah, right. 5 months later.....still doing this! ACK!

These are all in Santa Maria:

Ignore the 80's chandelier...it was going to come down...lol


From a loft looking down








I don't have any pictures of House #5... I had them on my camera, can't find them now.

Well, anyway we are on house #6, and it is in Lompoc. Originally when Charles asked if we should live in Lompoc, I said I did NOT want to live there for a variety of reasns, one being that it is really windy during certain parts of the year....reminds me of a town I just came from No mall, etc etc. I had a long list of reasons. We are actually living in an apartment in Lompoc right now as we wait for a house, in a little area known as The Village. One day I was running errands and it just hit me......... I don't mind this town. It is in a beautiful valley, any way you look you see the mountains, it is a huge agricultural area, so there is fresh produce everywhere you look, it is known for it's flower fields, so on the edge of town you can drive by acres and acres of colorful fields, it is nice and cool here all year, but warms up enough to swim and go to the beach, it is just too close to Charles work to ignore, my congregation is just wonderful, and one huge point for me, about 10 miles from the beach. Living in Santa Maria would have put me about 25 minutes...still close but anyway..... there are a lot more reasons ..OH and Santa Barbara is just down the road from Lompoc..LOVE Santa Barbara I just started thinking... living in The Village, I have found I don't mind Lompoc one single bit. So, much to our Realtor's frustration, we switched our search to Lompoc. It wasn't that big of a deal to us b/c we STILL hadn't heard anything on our offer on house #5. As I type this, we are almost at 4 months since we put that offer in and the bank STILL hasn't made a decision. If you want to know why this is, google SHORT SALES.

So, since our life was STILL on hold when trying to move to Santa Maria, we thought, well, maybe we should be focusing on Lompoc instead. So house #6 is in Lompoc is ALMOST closed on. The only hold up now, is the post-inspection details. The owner needs to fix some hazards that were found and he wants to do them himself, even though he lives in LA. Instead we just wanted a reduction in the price of the house to make up for US doing the work..so we'll see what works out now. If we can all come to an agreement on how this work gets done and who pays for it, this will be our house.

I still can't believe that THIS is what is happening. When thinking of moving to Cali, the LAST thing I thought of was a FULLLLL remodel on a house....