House Hunting

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Luke and I left the big kids with Nana and Grandpa and headed down to Nashville to look for a house! Our MD house was (finally) officially on the market, and we knew we needed to look at houses and get things moving on that end.

Luke was constantly looking on Redfin for homes in the Nashville/Franklin area that were in our price range, and sending me anything that looked like something that fit what we wanted. We had come up with a list of must-haves, and things that were preferences, and based on that found some houses to look at. We sent that list ahead of time to our realtor, who is a good friend of Luke's brother.

my backseat buddy

Since we were bringing Clara with us and knew we'd be in the car a lot, we left Friday afternoon and stopped about halfway down to spend the night in Wytheville, VA. Overall Clara did really well in the car, but I spent about 90% of our driving time sitting in the backseat with her. When we got into Nashville on Saturday, we quickly stopped at an open house, and then met up with the realtor to look at three houses. The next day we saw four more houses, and by the fourth one I was done. It's fun looking at houses and getting an idea of what you want, but the actual going around to look at everything, especially with a baby, felt overwhelming to me.

At the last house, I had just started to feed the baby a bottle so Luke went in with the realtor while I sat in the car. We were late for our showing time, so the couple that lived in the house was still home, but left once Luke went in. After awhile, Luke came out and asked me if I wanted to come in and look. I asked if it was worth it, and Luke said he thought so, so in we went. As we looked around, we talked about how this bedroom would go to the girls, this one to Jonah, this would be the kid's bathroom, imagined them running around in the backyard, and riding bikes up and down the street. The more we talked about it, the more we liked it!

We headed to a Mexican place for sustenance and to sit down and talk about everything we'd looked at. As we talked, we came to the decision to put an offer in on that last house! Crazy big decisions are always best decided while eating Mexican. :)

Our trip also included looking at two schools for Noelle (of course we loved the one that was too far from the house we put the offer on), visiting with our friends who just had their first baby in October, and some quality time with Luke's brother and his family. We ate at the Loveless Cafe, did a quick trip to what will be our local Target with a Starbucks, and drove on many roads that will become familiar to me eventually!