A few pictures of the kids

Here are a few new pictures of the kids. I took one of Ally and Tommy together (above). This doesn't happen often. I have to catch them in the right mood to take one together. lol

The rest of them are of Ally. She starts preschool on September 5th and her teacher has requested two pictures of Ally only and one family picture. So I had to take some ally-only pictures. Here are the two pictures of Ally that we are bringing to orientation on Wednesday night.

This one was taken a few weeks ago

and this one was taken the other day.

Here's another cute one. I'm still deciding which one of her in the blue shirt to give them.

On the market!

Hi! You all should see our house! It's looking SO good! :) I LOVE the new carpet. It's so soft, i just want to roll around on it! lol The house is so de-cluttered and clean. It's been so nice! The kids seem a little bored (10 boxes of toys have been put away, so all they have are the toys we left out in the basement. There are no toys upstairs at all). But they are doing fine. We're spending a lot of time in the basement or outside or going to the playplace near our town or having playdates w/ friends. I'm keeping them busy.

The house is officially on the market! We put it on a few fsbo sites last week. We haven't had much interest, but it's hard to advertise a fsbo home. There are a few online sites, but the paper isn't really a source anymore. It used to be that's where everyone would look. In fact, we found our first home in the paper. There used to be like 10 FSBO homes in the paper for each city. Now, there are only about 4 FSBO homes in the entire real estate section. We're still trying to figure out the best way to advertise.
We held our first Open House on Sunday. It was SO hot and we didn't really advertise, so we didn't expect anyone to be there, but we did have one couple. They seemed really nice. Their daughter goes to the in-home daycare provider down the street so they said it was great that it was so close. They seemed interested - took about 10 minutes looking around, which is pretty long. Matt and I know whether we like a house within about 2 minutes of setting foot in it. So we thought it was a good sign that they stuck around for a little longer. The hard thing is that we really don't know if they just saw the sign when they were dropping their daughter off and were curious or if they have been searching for a house and stumbled upon it. They may have a house to sell or may not even be pre-qualified at this point. I should have asked more questions, but I didn't want to seem over-eager and pushy. I guess if they are interested they will call.

We have a sign in the yard with a flyer in it. I made the flyer myself. It looks/sounds good if I do say so myself. :) Since this is a public site and I have pictures of my kids on this site, I cropped the picture so that the address and links to other sites can not be viewed and I blacked out the phone number. Let me know what you think! And if you see anything that I should crop out (for safety reasons) please let me know. It's easy to overlook those things.

Sorry, I can't make it any bigger. I know it's hard to read, but let me know if you think it looks good. :)

House plans

Well, we're still in the process of trying to get our house ready to sell. We will finally be getting our carpet in on Monday! YAY! :) We're so excited to be almost done with all the work to get it ready to sell! It's looking good, too!

We found a house we loved, and we were prepared to make an offer once our house sold, but I found out that someone else beat us to it. It was SUCH a nice house. It had everything we've been looking for. We were really disappointed to see that it now has a contract.

There's another house with the same layout that is on the market. We're now looking at possibly making an offer on that one. It's exactly the same house, but it doesn't have some of the features that we really liked in the first house. It's in a more sought-after neighborhood, so we still think that it would be a good investment. It's 11 years old. It's a 2 story with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. it has a nice level, fenced yard. The kitchen/breakfast room has hardwood floors. It's a little higher priced, but it can't hurt to make an offer so I think we'll probably do that and see if they'll accept it or at least negotiate. Oh well, we'll see...

We've done so much to our house. All the rooms are freshly painted. Both bathrooms have been remodeled, we're installing carpet in the living room, hall, and steps on monday. Matt's putting laminate (pergo-like) floor in the foyer tomorrow. We had the carpets cleaned. I've boxed up like 10 boxes of stuff (toys, dvds, cds, etc). I've done major cleaning and de-cluttering. It amazed me how much stuff we held on to. Mostly little things that we really didn't need. I threw away a ton of stuff. I've also done major selling on Craigslist.

So, as soon as the carpet is in, we'll try selling our house FSBO. If we don't get any bites, we'll have Matt's mom list it for us. Wish us luck! :)