We’ve testing out all of our appliances (our new stove/oven is freakin’ awesome), all our media center stuff is hooked up and working perfectly in our great room with our surround sound ceiling speakers.  We still have a half dozen house issues that hopefully will be resolved this week (after numerous calls and contractors stopping by in the past week and a half and a couple more coming tomorrow).

We ordered a bunch of furniture that should be arriving in the next couple weeks to help fill some space and we’ve got a laundry list of additional items we want to get over the next few months.

The kitties are all settled in.  Eowyn has been beyond good for how skittish she normally is (and she’s been kind enough to wake me up every morning at dawn to cuddle…grrr).  Sam is happy he has a perfect spot on the couch where he can be next to the window and get some sun in the morning.  Max is in heaven.  So much to check out, boxes everywhere and we once again have a patio that allows him to go outside.  Life could not be better for the Moose.

We’re not very happy to start back to work tomorrow, but it will be nice to sit for a day.  We’ve been on the go so much the past few weeks sitting in one spot for a few hours will actually be kind of nice.

Here are some photos of the house and a video walk through before all our stuff was inside.  Later this year once we have furniture for all the rooms I’ll do another video.  Enjoy!!

Still waiting for our Japanese maple to replace the sad looking evergreen. Put in a couple hanging baskets in the front yesterday.

The only room that's completely put together so far, our great room

The tacky neighbors with their 14 planters attached to their house, fake ivy on the rails and giant grapes that GLOW, yes, grape christmas lights. Ugh.

Sam's new favorite spot

Moose heaven, packing paper just from unwrapping all my frames

I seriously though Sam was going to jump into the jacuzzi tub while I had my back turned

Bought fuchsia and mixed baskets for each side of the back patio and our hummingbird and finch bird feeders are up as well.

Cannon Beach is our favorite Oregon beach town, it is small and not so touristy, lots of quaint little shops and restaurants downtown.  We had a nice hotel right on the beach.  I read an entire book in 2 days, we played in the water (very chilly), walked in the sand, had beach campfires roasting hotdogs and mallows.  All in all, exactly what we needed with all the housing stress lately.

And I caught some great sunsets those 2 nights!

We’ve been running errands, packing, painting, cleaning and organizing every day after work.  I’m happy to say that Scott’s terribly dark office is now back to white.  All wall holes have been patched.  I’ve scrubbed 2 of the 4 bedrooms and I spent a little less than 2 hours scrubbing the kitchen last night.  I pulled weeds for about an hour yesterday, have a bit more to go in the front.  We have been piling misc stuff from around the house in the living room and once we have that packed then all that is left is the things we have to do last minute (our offices, clothes, bathroom stuff).

I hired movers yesterday to come Tuesday morning.  I also hired carpet cleaners for Tuesday afternoon (we are determined to get our entire security deposit back).  We have our final walk through of the house scheduled for 2pm tomorrow, immediately followed by our closing on the house.

You know us, we’re super organized and planful so we are working through a nice excel spreadsheet of to-do items to get the house ready to leave and to get our address changed everywhere and all utilities started and stopped.

It’s been a crazy week but it will have a great ending.  We leave Saturday morning to spend 2.5 days relaxed in Cannon Beach before the move.  We’ll see you all on the flip side (which will be over the river and through the woods to our new home in Washington!!).

We had some wine and beer tastings, which resulting in me bringing an amazing bottle of pear wine home with me which did not last the day.  We had giant fresh yummy cookies at one of the fruit stands.  I found that I think I have an allergy to lavender – once we stopped at a lavender farm I thought I was going to die.  We saw amazing views of 2 giant mountains and miles of fruit trees.

We started our day at Double Mountain brewery so Scott could have some tasty fresh beer and we could have the pizza that we have grown to adore so much over the last couple years.  All in all, it was a perfect day.

Glorious Mt Hood

Miles and miles of white flowered fruit trees below

At a pick your own flower farm - can't wait to go back when it's roses!!

The most amazingly beautiful magnolia tree

Pretty pink trees and a giant mountain

They don't look pretty, but a ton of lavender smells amazing...until your allergies disagree

We are unfortunately not going to Astoria this weekend for their wine and seafood fest.  We are planning on moving in about 2 weeks and since we are spending our last weekend in this house at the coast, we felt we needed to stay here to finish packing, start painting and cleaning our place.

We had tons of great news on the housing front this week.  Monday our loan was approved through underwriting!  Hugh sigh of relief there.  Then Thursday our appraisal came back above our loan amount so another giant sigh of relief.  We have the inspection on Tuesday where we will learn about our house and walk thru to make sure everything is up to our expectations.  Our blinds/shades should be installed the first full week in May and then we’re looking to move to our new house on the 15th!  Whew!

2 weekends ago we drove up to Forest Park to check out Pittock Mansion.  Giant house built in the earlier 1900′s at the top of the forest with the most amazing views of the entire Portland area and 2 giant snow capped mountains.  It was beautiful!!

After that we drove across the river to a little park overlooking the river and had a little time to relax and enjoy the warm and sunny day.

This past weekend we had house business to attend to.  After choosing flooring and window treatments we drove East from our soon-to-be-new-home to check out the WA side of the Columbia River.  The views were literally breathtaking.

We stopped at Skamania Lodge, a very pricy hotel along the river on the WA side to have Sunday brunch.  This place was recommended to us from our pest control guy and I have to say…some of the best food ever.  Very pricy brunch ($31 a person) but it was amazing food including crab legs, shrimp, salmon and any breakfast food you could think of plus BOTTOMLESS MIMOSAS!  And of course this amazing view.

After stuffing ourselves we hopped over the river via the Bridge of the Gods and headed back towards Portland.  We wanted to take the historic Oregon highway which goes past all of the waterfalls through Multnomah.  Half of this road we’ve seen numerous times but we saw miles of this road we hadn’t previously.  We got to see a new waterfall and the Vista House, a very cool structure perched atop the mountains with more gorgeous river views.

All in all, a perfect day of gallivanting.  We are SO excited for this coming weekend when we’ll be heading back East to Hood River for some awesome Double Mountain pizza and beer and then taking the Fruit Loop tour which has a ton of wineries and fruit farms.  It is their annual bloom fest so we should get to see tons of beautiful flowering trees and of course, the majestic snow covered Mt Hood.  It’s supposed to be sunny, it’s supposed to be warm and it’s going to be amazing!

Until next week!

We first headed downtown along the riverfront to see the cherry blossoms start to bloom.  Great little park with tons of people milling about and beautiful trees!

After wandering in Chinatown for a bit we got back in the car and drove a few miles to Forest Park.  Forest Park is amazing, high up on a hill, giant forest.  Amazing.  Our destination this time was to find the “Witches Castle”.  I had seen photos online of this cool old stone building covered in moss in the middle of nowhere and figured it was a great photo opportunity.  After hiking what seems like days (and was actually only 1 mile but a solid uphill mile though) we finally found it.  The hike was beautiful.  You really feel like you are in the middle of nowhere among all the trees and hills and the trails followed a great little stream the entire way and the rushing sound of water was so calming.

It was so good to get out of the house and explore again.  I very much missing our weekly excursions around Oregon.  So once we got home we started looking at the festivals coming up this spring.  And I started looking for other nature places I want to explore.  We have a long list now of things to do!  Now we just need the weather to cooperate as it is still cold and rainy here.

In two weeks we are SO excited to head out to the Mt Hood area for their annual bloom fest.  We’ll get to see tons of blossoming trees, eat good food, drink good beer/wine and see the glorious mountain.  Very very excited and I’m sure I’ll come back with a few hundred photos (last weekend I took about 100 and I’m starting to shoot in RAW so my file sizes are insane now).

After the bloom fest we are hoping to head back to Astoria for their Crab and Wine festival.  Fresh seafood, good wine plus the home to The Goonies?  Ummmm….I’m there! We really love Astoria so I’ll be happy to go back.

The calendar is filling up fast so I will do my best to start posting more to give you recaps and photos from our explorations!

So we drove to another lot we liked, that the first builder was still evaluating for costs and feasibility (at this point they said it would be a day or two and it had been a week and we were still waiting for the estimates).  This one we loved the view, but because it was right against the giant power lines, our agent though the resale value would suffer greatly.

Checked out some other lots….builder isn’t willing to sell them and we don’t like the builder that owns them.  Completely dejected and getting pretty wet (it is the rainy season after all and we’ve been trudging through muddy lots for 2 hours) I give our agent a copy of an existing house I liked.  Maybe at this point we need to say screw it and settle for an ok house.  It happened that it was about a half mile away!

So we went over to the house and found that there were about 6 for sale on the same street.  As luck would have it, our agent also had to code to get the key out of each lockbox and we could look inside.  Score!!  First house was amazing.  3 story house on a hill with a view of the Columbia river and Mt Hood from the back.  Unfinished basement.  Not bad.  Back down the hill we saw the most amazing house….3 story, finished basement and it backs up to a forest.  Like a forest forest.  Protected green space with acres of fir trees covered in moss and what’s that?  Oh, that’s the sound of a nice sized creek running about 50 feet form the back yard.  Heaven.  It was perfect!  We looked at a couple more but we still went back to the blue house.

We left excited and anxious and worried as we were expecting to build and have 4 months to get things together and this would move things up to 30 days.  Eek!  We spent Sunday talking plans for our new blue house and then the call came in….the builder had accepted an offer the day before.  Nooooo!!!  But good news!  They can build the same exact house 5 doors down!  WAHOO!!!

So now we get the best of both worlds.  We get the perfect blue house that we loved, but we get the extra time we need to save money and pack all our crap.  We get to pick out all our finishes and colors.  We get to add upgrades that we really want that are difficult to put in a finished home (built in surround sound, CAT5 outlets, etc).  And we get the same amazing back yard that is nothing but forest and running creek sounds and beauty.

Monday we signed the final contract and wrote a large earnest money check.  Unless something terrible happens with our financing half way through (fingers crossed), we will be the proud owner of a 3,200 sq ft house with 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths and 2 extra areas in the finished basement.  Fully landscaped front and backyard with sprinklers and fencing.  We are paying $10k less than we were expecting for a 2,500 sq ft home with our other builder so more house for less.  We get $10k to spend on additional upgrades and a fridge, washer and dryer.  And we get our closing costs paid for.

Our weekend did not go as we had planned but it had a very happy ending.  We are past phase one which was very painful.  We have a long way to go.  There is still much to do and much that could go wrong I suppose.  But, the plan is to have our new finished home in June, just 3 short months from now.  And hopefully this move, which will be the 9th time in 12 years, will be our last.

<insert huge sigh of relief and a giant smile>

-Scott

Site maintenance guy (and hubby)

<Goes to Pintrest account created months ago and never touched> I’ll create a board about Hunger Games stuff to promote our 3 Etsy shops.  Better add some other Hunger Games items that aren’t mine.  Hmmmm, that was kinda fun.  Ok, let’s add a Harry Potter board.  Add our stuff.  Add other stuff.

Oooo, people are repinning my Hunger Games magnets!  Nice!  Let’s make a LOTR board.  Add our stuff.  Add other stuff.  More repins!  Wahoo!

I can’t get photography views, I’ll create an Oregon board of photographs.  OMG!  I found some new places I want to check out to take my own photos!  Write that down.

What is the point of this site?  Like Facebook for links?  Oooo, fun Big Bang Theory stuff, gotta follow that person’s board.  Oh, that Winnie the Pooh photo is funny, repin to my board.  Oooo, I like that dress!

2 hours later.  Ok.  I get it.  It’s crack.  I want more for no good reason.  Guess I need to add Pintrest to my daily rotation of to-dos.

The start of my new insanity.

This weekend was no exception on the busy front.  We got some bad news late Friday on the plots of land we were looking to build on, they are way too expensive to build on.  So back to square one.  We spent 7 hours in the car Saturday looking at additional builders, checking out new lots, looking at lots we had already seen and going to an open house for an existing home.  It was exhausting.  We came home with MUCH more information than we knew what to do with.  We had to make some cut throat decisions to weed out some of our choices and came up with just a couple.

On Sunday we got back in the car and back across the river to look at some additional lots.  We found one we really like!  Smaller than the one we were set on, but larger than the builder could offer us in their community.  Up on a hill.  View of Mt Hood and the gorgeous Columbia River from the lot.  Yay!

We came back and sent the lot info over to the builder to get an estimate, fingers crossed it comes back much lower.

This morning I got a note from our agent who said that the competitor builder we were checking out has a community right near the lot we were looking at.  Similar floor plans and upgrades for less money and larger lots.  We’re waiting on some more info on sizes and times we can check them out.  Looks like they might be a viable option as well, we can get more house for less money which is ultimately the best option right?

After all the house stuff yesterday we had some business errands to run and we got to escape for about an hour and go for a walk in the park near our house.  It was beautiful, sunny and warm yesterday (quite the contrast from the nasty windy cold rain we have right now) so it was great to get out and go for a walk.  And apparently everyone else had the same idea, the place was packed!  I took a few photos of all the beautiful moss in the forest.  This is one of the best features of Oregon, greeeeeeeeeen things.

We also had a ton of business work to do last night.  We had about 20 orders of art and magnets to package for shipment today and we had a new magnet set to prep.  Of course first I had to re-build my light box, which was a pain in the butt.  But, we got new photos taken and I got the listing up this morning before work.

Behold, Hunger Games!

We have 3 additional sets in various stages of release so hopefully I can get all 3 of them ready and up by the end of the week.

Here’s to the start of another crazy week!  And we’ll try to take at least a little time out to have some “fun”.