The Reed Family: A Year Ago Today.....

My how time flys! A year ago today we closed on our house that we live in now. For those of you that don't know when Billy & I got married 4 years ago we built a house in Sunchase right outside of Brandon. We loved that house and everything thing about it. The only thing that we wished for was for it to be on a couple of acres of land and in a smaller neighborhood where the houses weren't so close together. We had been looking at land from time to time but never could find any that we could afford and still stay in our house or we would find some that we could afford and someone would buy it before we could get pre-approved and put a contract on it. Have y'all seen how much they want for land these days???? Its crazy! It's like paying another mortgage. Anyway we had almost given up hope.
One Monday morning our friend who is a realtor called me at work and said look....I found this house that just came out on the market today and it is the deal of the century. It is 2400 sq ft with 10 acres of land out in Johns/Puckett. It is a foreclosure and wont last long. She asked me if i could meet her out there after work. With the luck we have had I told her heck no, I was leaving work now and me and my dad would meet her out there! So I left work, called Billy and told him what was going on and raced over there. I figured with it being a foreclosure the house would be some little house that we would end up bulldozing down one day and build another house on but I was wrong. Now don't get me wrong, the house needed lots of work and there are still things to do but it was in much better shape than I imagined and it is 2 miles from my parents house! So the realtor gets there and she goes to unlock the door and we realize that the front door knob is missing so we end up coming on in. We walk in and look to the right where the formal dining room is and the walls are painted red. At this point I knew this was MY house. Those of you that know me know that I have an obsession with my dining room being red and when we built our last house the builder was not real happy with me bc it took 6 coats of paint to paint our dining room and kitchen. On the way over to the house I was telling my dad that if we got the house he better get ready bc the dining room would be red. Anyway, so we walk around the house and notice that ALL of the door knobs are missing, inside and out! All of the appliances were missing, stove, microwave, dishwasher, oven etc. The knobs to the tub and sinks in the master bedroom were gone. In the hall by the laundry room, what looked like a bear had eaten/scratched the sheet rock and there was a hole in the wall big enough for Delilah to crawl up in and take a nap. The house smelt like there were 1,000 goats that lived in there. There were toys and crap EVERYWHERE in the yard. The grass was uncut and came up to my waist. Even though the house was a total disaster I knew that with a little work and imagination we could make it nice. So I ended up putting a contract on it right away, keep in mind that at this point Billy has not even seen the house and I have put a contract on it...ha! Yeah, to say the least he was a little nervous for the rest of the day. From this day on life has been a whirlwind. We found a house, put a contract on it and closed in 17 days plus we were preparing for our Italy trip in two weeks. We were a little stressed.

With all the excitement of finding the house there was one small detail that we had not thought about. Finding this house was a complete surprise. We were not looking to move, therefore, our house was a complete DISASTER! It looked like a bomb went off in it and was no where close to being ready to put on the market. The next problem that we thought about was we have two houses which means two house notes and houses in our neighborhood were not selling real fast....what were we thinking. The lord must have been looking out for us because we ended up selling our old house in a month. In the end after selling our old house we swapped our old house and for 15-20,000 more we have a much bigger house with 10 acres of land in the country. Just what we were looking for! As our realtor kept telling us, if it was meant to be it will happen. And it did! Little did we know that a year from then we would have a one month old baby. The plan was to start trying about this time this year but instead God had a different plan for us. Funny how things work out.

Here are some pics that were taken the day we put a contract on the house. Hopefully this week I can take some "after" pics with all the updates that we have done.

Master Bath Tub