The Castle

CJ's castle is finally completed and it looks great! Click on the album below to see it...

Castle

SOLD!!!

It's been nearly one year since we first listed our house for sale, and I'm happy to report that as of today, we are the proud homeowners of only ONE house! WAHOO!

I can hardly believe our luck. We had the worst timing on this one. When we bought our new house without first selling the old, we had no idea what we were in for. We figured that we'd have the house on the market for at the most 6 months. Who would have known that the market was going to get crappier as the year went by? For the past few months, every time we've heard some market analyst talking about how bad things are, we'd get more and more stressed out.

CJ was really the 'rock' on this one. (as usual) He maintained that we'd just ride the market out, not get desperate, and hope that things would start to turn around. I was beyond impatient. The old house was like a monkey on my back and I couldn't help but obsess over it. Even though we weren't in financial trouble, it just felt so wrong to have that house sitting empty for so long. I think I reached maximum frustration when I wrote a check to the gas company for nearly $200 this winter to heat a house that was vacant. Oh, and during the summer last year, we would drive a half hour each week to mow the lawn....and I wasn't looking forward to another summer of double lawn work.

So as of today, the old house is sold, closed, and completely out of our hands now. I'm ecstatic! I loved that house and think the new homeowners will love it too. It was such a great first house, but I'm so happy to not be stressing about the local housing market anymore. Thank you to everyone who expressed your concern, love, and prayers for our situation over the past year. Here are a couple things that I've learned from the whole experience...

1. I think I'm going to let CJ make the next housing decision - I'm a little impulsive and this is what got us into the situation in the first place. We definitely could have waited to sell our house, and then bought now. If it was completely up to CJ, this is how we would have done it. We probably would have passed on the great house we have right now, but we could have gotten a great deal on a different house and bought in a buyer's market.
   
2. I don't think that we will ever hire a real estate agent again. In our opinion, real estate agents make WAY too much money for what they do. I don't want to offend any of my agent readers, but we were definitely not impressed with the representation we received...and we tried multiple different agents. We received a really good offer in December that we believe fell through because of our real estate agent. They make promises that they don't keep and sometimes they get in the way. In the end, they never really represent the buyer or the seller, and we feel that all of the agents we dealt with were on some level a little bit dishonest. And the thing about it, when do you ever pay someone 5-10 thousand dollars for a service to you? We figured that our previous agent had spent around 10 hours total listing our house. That means that they would have made over $700 per hour just to list our house if they would have sold it! In January, we'd had enough of our agent, and we opted to try to list it ourselves. We paid Lowes Flat Fee $500 to list our house on the MLS. We made and printed fliers, put the sign in the yard, got the realtor's lockbox, and handled all incoming offers and transactions ourselves. We got the same amount of showings that the last agent we had got, and we found that we were able to give/get better feedback from the agents showing our house. The entire process was so easy and we're really grateful to have been able to not pay an agent loads of money to sell our house. In this terrible market, we needed all of the help we could get, and we were able to list our house more competitively because we weren't paying an agent to list it.

Here are a couple of good resources I found when searching for our current house as well as getting advice on selling:

A great MLS search tool using Google Maps - http://earthpoint.us

A local real estate broker with some good advice and insights - http://www.boiseblog.com

Easter at the Sweigarts

What do you do to celebrate Easter when there are no children for an Easter egg hunt? Yep, you guessed it... you torture your dog by making him dress up like a bunny for a photo shoot....

Filled inside his little basket was a bunch of Ol' Roy dog treats. He buried himself in the basket and devoured them. Afterwards, he ran around the house with his little basket. It was adorable and had us laughing hysterically.

I decided to be a good sport and pose for the camera with the bunny ears as well...

And then I was able to manipulate CJ into wearing the ears for a photo too. :) Here he is hard at work on our great little castle. I'll post a picture when it is complete.

So we've had a pretty easy going day around here. We got up early to join the "regulars" at McDonalds for breakfast. These people consist of an old man that always falls asleep in his chair, and a strange man who always hogs all of the newspapers and sits directly under the television with his cell phone plugged into the wall. We've grown quite fond of our McDonalds weekend mornings, so Easter was not going to be an exception.

When we got home, we took Bachelor out back into the foothills for a hike. The view was very pretty and the hills are covered right now with green fuzzy grass. Bachelor had the time of his life and sniffed nearly every little pothole and sagebrush he ran into.

And then this afternoon has been spent doing chores, painting the castle, and having a nice relaxing time.

Spring is on its way

Spring is on its way and I couldn't be happier about it. I was REALLY getting tired of the snow and the overcast days of winter. The snow this year was quite a bit more than usual, so I am welcoming spring with a huge sigh of relief.

Something about the wintertime, especially after the holidays have passed, just really puts me in a sour mood. I find myself wanting to hibernate and it is really difficult to motivate me to be out and about when it is snowy, cold, and gets dark after 6pm.

I love Boise and love the four seasons, but sometimes I think living somewhere where it is 55 degrees all of the time would suit me just fine. This week we could hear song birds while we were getting ready in the morning. It has been rainy the past few days and I love how the grass all around the valley is awakening and turning green. The smells of spring are amazing...really the only thing that tops it is the first nighttime summer smell in June.

Bachelor had his first mud-hole excavation earlier this week. He digs a hole and then burries himself in it face first. It is hilarious to watch especially since he looks like a dog doing a headstand in a pile of dirt. He gets really serious about it. Normally I'd say that you shouldn't encourage your dog to dig, but somehow the little guy knows that he can only dig up in the foothills and leaves our pretty yard alone. I took this picture right after his digging adventure. I love how he is smiling and noticably very happy.

And while Bachelor was digging, CJ was doing yard work. What could be better than a beautiful spring day with your family? I'm not a huge fan of yard work, but love it when CJ does it. He really has a green thumb and it makes me feel like I am being taken care of. Growing up, there was no Dad to do the yard work, so it really warms my heart when I see him taking care of the family.

And I took this picture as "proof" of Spring. This is the first little flower that has bloomed in our yard. I can't wait to find others like it.

Happy St. Patty's Day - From Bachelor

Froggy Update

Just thought you might be interested....

It has been almost a year now that we've had a wild frog living as a pet in our house! I never believed that CJ would have kept this little guy around this long...but he's still alive and well, and FAT too.

Childhood Friend

One of my favorite aspects of my marriage is that I am truly married to my best friend. I know I know...that is a very 'cliche' thing to say, but it is true. Although I do need some good girl time now and then, I love spending so much time with CJ.

When I was little (6-11), there was a neighborhood friend that I used to spend all of my time with. Evan and I would run around finding bugs, playing with toy cars, and riding our bikes around. It was great and we were very close.

It sounds funny, but CJ is very much like my childhood friend. Although I didn't know him when I was young, it has always felt like I have. And I think one of the things that makes me feel that way is that CJ brings out the child in me. He LOVES to do crafty things like painting, modeling, carving, sculpting. One day he made a kite out of a garbage bag and it flew higher than any kite I had ever seen. It was amazing.

So every now and then CJ and I neglect our household chores and all of our responsibilities and we 'play' together like kids. For the past two weekends, this has been what we've been up to. The weekend before last, we spent an hour at the craft store getting a bunch of acryllic paints. We bought TONS of bottles and every color you could imagine. Then when we got home, we mixed custom colors and put them in little bottles. Here is a photo of some of the final bottles....

This weekend, we bought a special mold to make miniature castle blocks. CJ found and purchased the mold on the internet and we went to a store in Garden City to purchase some special dental plaster. You have to make 18+ molds to put together one castle, and the process is quite consuming...but we pretty much have spent all weekend making little plaster blocks so that we can put together and paint a castle...

Sometime this week, we'll be assembling our castle and then we'll start the process of painting it and adding scenery around it. I can't wait to post the finished project.

Bye Bye Orange

This weekend I began my big project to transform the orangy-colored basement into a warm neutral colored living space. Ever since we've moved into this new house, this has been the area that gets the least amount of use...and that is a shame because it is nearly 600 square feet. We've been watching television on an old TV upstairs and it is time to have a nice living/family room.

My Mom came over on Friday after work to help me begin priming. Since the old color was so vibrant, we put about 2 coats of white primer on. Friday we were able to get most all of the priming done and Saturday morning I finished. Later Saturday afternoon, my Mom and sister Becca came over to help. We painted the ceiling white (it was white before, but desperately in need of some fresh paint) and then painted the room a butter cream color. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work.

Here are some pictures....

So it is hard to see from the picture, but the final color is very much like butter cream. It is really warm and light. Unfortunately the carpet looks even more blue with this color, but that project is definitely for another weekend. I'm really pleased with the results and can't wait to get my new furniture in there. That furniture should arrive in a few weeks. So if all goes well, I'll have a complete room by the end of March. I couldn't have achieved such a big painting project in a weekend if it weren't for my Mom, my sister, and my hubby.

Since I am not much of a painter (I love to be surrounded in white) and am quite the beginner, I thought I'd record the "casualties" of the weekend as well as my favorite new painting tips....

• Bachelor is a bit of a pain when painting. Half-way through the project, he was leaning against a wall of wet paint. He now is a black and white dog with white primer specks all over. Also, one of my walls has a bit of dog hair forever implanted in it.
• Around 12am Friday night I stepped in my paint tray, knocking it all over. Even though I wanted to stay up later working, I decided to call it a night.
• Prepping the area with lots of blue tape and drop cloths was the best move. If I hadn't have done this I would have a giant white paint stain from knocking the paint can over.
• Priming is a good idea. It feels like a pain and isn't as fun as painting the main color, but once we got around to painting the main color it went on smoothly and we only needed one coat.
• My Mom told me to get disposable paint trays, disposable rollers, and disposable brushes. This was awesome and made cleanup a snap.
• We put saran wrap over our brushes and paint tray and put them in the fridge over night to save prep work the following day.
• We combined all 3 cans of paint into a 5 gallon bucket with a grate attached in the inside. This was much easier than the paint tray and ensured that all 3 cans of paint were mixed well.

Even though I am really pleased with the results, I have to say that painting remains on my short list of things that I want to avoid. It is a lot of work and it is quite messy. :)