New Digs

As I mentioned a few posts ago, we are deep in the trenches of selling our home and buying a new one. This whole idea started about 19 months ago when our little cozy life of couple-dom ended and we became a family. Suddenly, 943 square feet felt VERY SMALL.
When we bought our little West Asheville bungalow in 2006, it was the quintessential first-home - a nice little cottage with some opportunities for improvement (namely the landscaping that had been neglected even though the inside had been gutted prior to our buying) and would make for a nice-sized home for Michael and I and Zola. It was an upgrade from our 650 square foot house in Montford, so we thought it was absolutely dreamy. I mean, this house had a hallway - a HALLWAY! And casement windows in either side of the fireplace, and picture-frame moulding, and 9-foot ceilings, and was walking distance from the pub, and a pedestal tub! After all, we were not yet married and on the "five-year plan" for kids. We all know how well that worked out.
We put a lot of love, sweat, and tears into this house. That sounds totally wrong, but really....hours and hours of home improvement projects from re-tiling the bathroom walls to putting a display niche in the dining room, to re-wiring the electric wires to building a wood-fired pizza oven, to planting a beautiful dogwood in the yard. Ok, so Michael put a lot of the sweat and tears into the house, but for both of us, it was a labor of love.
But along the way we found out just how annoying an 80+ year old house can be. Oh, the plumbing to the kitchen sink had never been replaced and had decades of the most disgusting muck you have ever seen living in it. The floor beneath the bathroom did not have a sub-floor or insulation making for a great, albeit, drafty view into the basement whenever you sat on the toilet. The beautiful yard that was perfect for some garden beds turned out to be a repository for garbage with tons of car parts, glass bottles, rocks, and general detritus where luscious organic soil needed to be (you don't want to know how much soil I sifted to get clean beds.) Then there was the water heater that sat on a crack in the concrete floor of the basement that decided to die one day forcing us to replace it with an on-demand water heater. Then there was the small, inconvenience of having to go outside into the basement to do laundry, which with a baby, is every other day.
With the "complications" of parenthood, we soon decided that our little bungalow was no longer our dream house and we needed to upgrade. And so the house-search ensued. Sure it was the worst time to sell a house, but we knew that we had done enough to it to make something, even in this deflated market. The good news was that it was a great time to BUY a house. Options were limitless....or were they?
Unfortunately or fortunately, Michael and I have very specific (and expensive) tastes. It did help that after four years in our house we knew what we absolutely did NOT want. Then there are the specific needs of a family house/neighborhood. We needed a dishwasher, and a flat yard, a safe walking area, close to parks or pools, at least 1500 sq ft, so family could stay with us if they visited, a kitchen to entertain, basement for storage and workshop, central heating/cooling, master bedroom for a king size bed and a double sink (and a decent closet), washer/dryer inside, built within the last 20 years, and maybe, just maybe a nice jacuzzi tub. Oh, and in our price range.
We started the house hunt right after putting ours on the market, which I knew was a dangerous thing to do since we had no idea how well or fast ours would sell. What if we found our dream house immediately, but couldn't buy it because ours had not sold? This, of course, turned out to be true when we found a new construction in Black Mountain that was P-E-R-F-E-C-T (and built by the dad of this kid I went to high school with). It had three porches (even one screened), huge granite counter tops, carpet in the bedrooms, 1638 sq ft, .28 flat acres, 3 bedrooms, two and a half baths, tall, low-E windows and a LOT of them, a basement to be potentially finished, nice landscaping including a cherry tree, and everything else on our wish list. But we had to keep it in the back of our mind because our house was still three months from being under contract.
Right before Christmas vacation (and in the midst of the 14" snow storm) we got an offer and accepted it, but left town before deciding our next step. Over the course of the holidays we hunted and hunted for all types of houses (even reducing our price range to find a "fixer upper" if need be), so that when we returned we had a list of ones to see with our realtor. On that Sunday, we had a friend watch Mason, so we could be quick and decisive about what we saw, but in the middle of our showings were still thinking of the Black Mountain house. On a whim, we asked if we could go out to see it and learned that they had just been emailed an offer on the house that morning and were reviewing it. "Just sit on it for a little bit," begged our realtor while we sped off to see it for the second time.
As we walked through the house, we knew it just felt right and had every single thing we were looking for. We wouldn't have to compromise a thing. So, we put in our best offer in hopes that it was competitive to the one they already had, volleyed back and forth with the sellers a few times and went under contract two weeks ago.
So far, so good. While waiting for our 2/17 close, we are feverishly searching Craig's List for the few items we will need to fill the place out - a washer/dryer, king, bed, living room chairs, and dining room table. Although we are sad to move away from West Asheville and our first home together, we can't wait have our "new" dream house.

New Year's Day

New Year's has a long tradition in our family as a day of TV and food. Yes, I'm sure many of you are with me, but we've got a long line of memories stemming from this special day, which starts at 8am PST with the Rose Parade. Since as far back as I can remember this is the parade we always tune into...not the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade with it's lame-o blow-ups, but the Rose Parade with the months and days of preparation of floats covered entirely by flora.
Back in 2000, my brother's college football team happened to be playing in the Rose Bowl, so we decided to all converge on Pasadena, CA for a New Year's family bash. To start with my mom somehow hooked up with the Cal-Poly group who was creating a float for the parade and got us to volunteer to put on flowers the day before the event. Now, the designs for these floats are developed a year in advance, with the structures being built 6-months out. Since the flowers are of delicate composition and a short life-span, they don't get glued on until the few days before the parade. So, here we are in refrigerated tents, gluing on seeds and leaves and flower petals ONE AT A TIME. Needless to say, this is an arduous, time-consuming task, but incredible when you see that hundreds of square feet of a moving float are covered in these individual leaves, seeds, and petals.
So after working for a couple of hours, it was time to pick our spot on the street along the parade route to camp out over night. I've done my fair share of street-side camps (one word: Pampalona), but this was pretty cool because it also happened to be the Y2K year where potentially all computer systems would implode and leave society incapacitated...at least, that was the theory. Luckily, we faced the possibility of fiscal break-down on the streets with a couple hundred thousand of our friends. I remember it being freezing (hello, wasn't this southern california?), but luckily we stayed bundled in sleeping bags and had a bottle of bubbly. When 7am rolled around, the world hadn't ended, and the streets got really crowded, we were proud of our determination. After watching the parade go by a mere feet from our feet (especially entertained by the very-obnoxious Stanford Marching Band), we knew this was something we would do again. Later in the day, we traipsed over to watch the football game and our New Year's was complete.
Mostly, I realize that it is nice to have family traditions...things that we can pass on to our children, so that when we watch the parade on TV we can say: "We'll go there someday" and we mean it.

Vacation

First of all, I am officially a horrible blogger. Second of all, I'm a horrible journal-er unless I'm traveling, which is probably why I'm a horrible blogger. I just lack motivation and oftentimes wait to be "inspired" with something that might be interesting and worth reading. But I suppose that is part of the art of blogging - writing about nothing in particular, but somehow making it reader-worthy and interesting.
I do have a couple of good excuses - 1) we went on vacation for 8 days; 2) we are under contract to sell our house and buy another (with all the details, inspections, addenda, and paperwork that involves); and 3) well, there is no three, but those are two very time-consuming excuses.
But more on our dreamy vacation to visit my dad in Santa Barbara where we enjoyed 65 degree weather over Christmas, visited family (dad, uncle, and great uncle/aunt), watched sunsets, played on the beach, ate great food and drank good wine. Did I mention it was 65 degrees (this coming from 14 inches of snow we got the weekend before leaving and 0 degree temps we had for two weeks after our return)?
I like vacation even though I go into it with grand delusions of all of the things I'll accomplish. "I will run every day!" "I will read a book!" "I will learn to speak Chinese!" And at the end of vacation, usually all I have accomplished is gaining a pound or two (see food/drink accomplishments) and laying around too much in my pajamas. It usually takes me two to three days to decompress from work/life, which also conveniently involves imbibing in said food/drink (funny how these relate to each other). In my case it also included getting a wretched, hacking cough that stayed with me for the entirety of the trip. Bye-bye every day runs on the beach. To my credit, I did walk and hike almost every day.
Vacation also usually comprises of some overly-involved research for something very important to occupy our time. Since this was our first trip to California with baby, research now expanded into "children-friendly activities." For all the love I have of Santa Barbara, I wouldn't categorize it as the children capital of California. They do well for the middle-aged, expendable income set, but not so much for little tykes.
Despite not having "structured" children activities, we quickly found that Mason could not get enough of the beach. He found it hilarious to have the water creep onto shore and hit his legs. Sand made for a great hair conditioning product and salt water tasted darn skippy. We would end most trips with him stripped of his clothes and his diaper quadrupled in size because he had gotten soaked.
We were quite impressed with the Santa Barbara Art Museum and it's new Children's Gallery, which is an interactive art-related space where kids can draw, touch frames and learn more about artistic stylings. We had a fabulous tour from the great docent, Mr. McElwain, but sadly Mason just didn't care for the Monets or Chagalls. In LA, we visited the Zimmer Children's Museum where Mason's favorite activity was the water table, ambulance, and toddler "Bounce Room." We can't wait for our next trip to visit the the soon-to-be-complete Children's Museum of Los Angeles.
All in all, vacation is worth the wait, the pounds, the travel time, and the cold.