Home, Sweet Home

These past couple of weekends we have made visits to Temple to check out houses. Our first day looking there was long, but productive. We found two AMAZING houses that I wanted to mix together to make the perfect home. One had incredible storage in the attic, bedrooms and closets galore! Plus we may have been able to finangle an awesome play place out of it. But the other one had a formal dining area that comes off of the living room (aka: a play room for us). Unfortunately, we couldn't get the best of both worlds. So, we had to make a choice. We chose the one with the "formal dining" area because I desperately wanted somewhere to keep the girl's toys out of my living room (and I know that even if I had a designated "playroom" down the hall, the toys would always be in my living room). And, with some of my upcoming construction skills, I could create more storage space in this home. So, we put down an offer, did lots of back and forth negotiating, and got it! Wow! I can't believe we are buying a house! I'm still really nervous about it, but we knew that we wanted to after running several numbers and comparing the cost of renting versus buying.

So, without further blabbering, this will be our new home as of June 5th!

 

It's a brand new home from Centex. 4 Bedroom, 2 Bath. It's the Brooks floorplan, if you are interested.

Straight ahead is the front door, so it opens up to a hallway with a couple bedrooms and laundry. This is the part of the floorplan that I thought was weird at first, but it's actually lit very well and not as long as the floorplan and pictures make it look.

This is the front bedroom to the left. I think that this will be used as a guestroom initially and eventually will also be my office/craftroom.

Main bathroom

And the 2nd bedroom. This one will be Lydia and Hannah's bedroom. Lydia is VERY excited!

This is the laundry room. It's kinda an L shape, so the dryer is ahead and to the left is the washer. And the garage door is on the right.

And here is the garage. With sprinkler system :) 

And then it opens up to the formal dining, living room, kitchen and "breakfast" area. However, first I'll take you further to the right where there is the 3rd bedroom.

Ta Da!

Okay, now this is the formal dining nook. Perfect for toys! I can totally picture the play kitchen, dollhouse and book cases here. We're planning to switch around some of the light fixtures, so that one will be moved to our real dining area.

And here is the kitchen! So open and spacious!

And the breakfast area is a nice size too, for our big table :)

And the living room. They will be putting ceiling fans in here and also in all of the bedrooms. That was part of all the negotiating :). We also were able to get them to add a fridge, garage door opener, and blinds on all of the windows.

Looking out from the kitchen to the living room.

Lydia enjoyed running around the house everywhere! I think she is amazed by all of the open space!

And this is the master bedroom, it comes off the living room/dining room.

And the master bathroom. We plan to put some cabinets above the toilet. As I mentioned, there wasn't a ton of storage. No linen closet. Bummer. But we're figuring stuff out :).

And a nice size backyard. Awesome!

Lydia and Hanna really enjoyed running (or crawling) all around the house! They are so excited! Lydia keeps telling me that she wants to move to her new house now!

They had a lot of fun.

 

 

Another perk of this house is that just a block away we have this!

I am so excited! It's a really nice neighboorhood and looks like Lydia will be able to find tons of new friends there! I'll definitely have my work cut out for me getting everything organized and built. But I am so ready!

This is definitely our new Home just waiting! And I am already in love with Temple! It is the perfect town for us! Still a little country, but developing. It has a mall and all of the main shopping you need. Plus Austin is just an hour away! Hooray! 2 months can't go by fast enough!