That Time We Owned Two Houses

Well, it's official. In 55 days now, we could potentially own two houses in the Cleveland area. Fingers crossed that isn't the case.

Let me back up a bit.

In case you haven't been following this blog for a while, Derek and I moved to Cleveland 3.5 years ago for his job. I stayed on with my awesome ad agency and work from home and the stint up here in Ohio was only supposed to be 3 years. After that amount of time we were probably going to be transferred to another city. Welllll.... things change and so do employers and we're now staying here for a while. I've blogged about it here, but we really don't mind. It's a great city and if we were closer than a 13 hour drive home, we'd probably stay!

Anywho, the original idea was to find a house close to downtown in order to minimize Derek's commute. We were kidless and knew we would be out of here in 3 years so schools and the community weren't really a priority. Once we realized, however, that we could be up here for another good amount of time (we have no idea if it's another 3 years or 10!), we started debating moving out farther to the 'burbs. After interviewing 3 realtors in 2012 when the economy was down, we decided to stay and just send Drew to private school.

Fast forward to last month where we realized the market had been going strong for sellers and discussing potentially expanding our family at some point. The community, neighborhood and schools became a daily discussion. The debate went on for a few weeks as we weighed the pros and cons of moving until we decided that we just had to. We felt that moving would enrich Drew's youth putting him in a better area with top schools and tons more kids. The problem, however, was the availability of housing. The area we're moving to has a lot of new construction and when a house goes on the market, it's plucked up before you finish viewing the first picture. We were all set to build until I checked out realtor.com just one more time last week. That's when the stars aligned.

One new house was listed and it was completely meant to be. The area we wanted, a fantastic neighborhood with amenities, under our budget, top schools, the space we needed and only 4 years old. SOLD? Derek and I quickly made an appointment to see it (along with 13 other families in those first two days it was listed!) and we knew it was perfect. Without even having ours listed yet, we put an aggressive offer in and after over 24 hours of waiting, it was contracted to us!

Here's where you want a picture right? Unfortunately, it's already taken down from the website and my personal phone pic sucks. I'll get one soon enough! For now, we're staging and focusing on our house to be listed within the next couple of days. So again, please cross your fingers for us that we sell our current house decently fast! Trying to clean the house every morning to be 'show ready' after a toddler tears it up is not something I'm looking forward to.

#sendwineplease