The month of June for us basically revolved around preparing to move out of our house—dealing with the home inspection/appraisal, making repairs, looking for a new place to live, packing everything up, moving, unpacking, and closing on the house. Oh, and two full weeks of swim lessons…and a few other fun things mixed in here and there. It was BUSY! But we somehow survived—thanks mostly to all of the help we received from our family and friends. Here are the highlights from the first half of the month:
Friday, June 2nd was National Doughnut Day! If you know us well, you know that we always try to take advantage of free food offers ;)
That week happened to be our week to clean the church building, so we did that first thing in the morning and headed to get our free doughnuts after that as a special treat. Yum!
Saturday, June 3rd was the day of the annual Dvorak family reunion at Joe Wheeler. It was a fun day! The kids enjoyed “swimming” in the inflatable pool again this year. I thought this was a cute picture of Savannah. Sometimes it’s hard to catch her genuine smiles on camera, so I was glad we got this one :)
Somehow Carter got a nap during the middle of all the chaos that day!
As usual, everyone enjoyed playing board games and sitting around catching up. Some people played tennis and ultimate frisbee as well. We bought a new ice cream maker a few months ago, so we tested it out for the first time at the reunion with pina colada sorbet. It turned out great!
Allen and Debbie brought their new puppy, Ajax, to the reunion this year. Brooklyn and Savannah enjoyed checking him out :)
The girls did great all day. Neither one took a nap…not too surprising for Brooklyn, but Savannah had never missed a nap that I can remember. She was surprisingly in a pretty pleasant mood all day long! Reunions are definitely easier with toddlers/preschoolers than young babies, so we didn’t have it too bad this year. Next year, we’ll start all over again though! :)
Monday, June 5th was Travis’s 31st birthday (no pictures because we didn’t do anything super special that night…sorry, dear!), but it was also the day of our house appraisal. I wasn’t too worried about it, but we were glad to get it over with. The appraiser didn’t stay too long…just took measurements and pictures and that was that. He basically told me before he left that as long as the buyer is willing to pay the agreed-upon price, he tries to do as much as he can to make the house appraise for at least that amount. Our personal opinion is that appraisals are a bunch of bologna, but whatever. It took several days, but we did learn at the end of the week that the appraisal came back high enough. Checked that off the list!
The next, June 6th, we had our home inspection at 11 AM. We thought we might meet Travis for lunch, but he wasn’t able to get away from work, so we ended up going to the playground at Dublin Park for a little while and then on to Chick-fil-a for a girls date :)
The girls had a fun time at the playground, and we enjoyed our lunch date at Chick-fila, but boy…I was NOT prepared for how long the inspection would last. I figured maybe 1.5-2 hours and he’d be finished. We’d get home right at nap time, and it would be perfect. Nope! It took the guy almost THREE AND A HALF hours! He did not leave our house until 2:20 PM. I was beyond frustrated! We hung around at Chick-fil-a for a long time, and finally I decided we would head on back toward the house even though the realtor hadn’t let me know the inspector was finished yet. We drove by the house and sure enough he was still there. We then headed to Cici’s house to kill some more time. Savannah had fallen asleep in the car by this point, and of course she woke up when I tried to carry her inside. And then it was only another 15 or 20 minutes before the guy was finished and we could go back home. And Savannah never would go back to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. It was just a frustrating day, but apparently I should have been better prepared for how long it might take. We learned after the fact that this particular inspector is notoriously slow…wish I’d known that ahead of time! :)
Aside from dealing with the appraisal and home inspection, I mostly spent all of my free time that week searching for a rental home or apartment where we could live after we moved. By this point, we had looked at several houses for sale that we thought we might be interested in buying, and sadly decided none of them were “the one”. The one that probably came the closest was in Walden Preserve in Madison, and it was beautiful! It was almost nice enough to convince me we should make an offer despite the fact that it had a major flaw in the floorplan—the master bedroom shared a wall with one of the other bedrooms downstairs. We were definitely looking for a house with an isolated master, so it obviously wasn’t the house for us. But it was so pretty!
Anyway, once we ruled out buying something and trying to move straight into it after our closing, we turned our attention to the search for a rental. It involved a spreadsheet (of course, since I’ve been married to Travis for almost 10 years now!), lots of emails/phone calls, and visiting two different places in person. We knew that we needed at least 3 bedrooms, as much square footage as possible, a short lease (since we didn’t know how soon we might find something to buy), and preferably a garage or storage space. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was going to be EXTREMELY hard to find a rental house with less than a 12 month minimum lease. And most of the rental houses I looked into had no option to pay a fee to break the lease early…we would just have to keep on paying the rent for the full year even if we found a house sooner than that. No thank you! On the flip side, many of the apartments I looked into were either tiny (1200-1300 square feet for a 3 bedroom) or they didn’t have a unit available when we needed it.
So, it was fairly easy to narrow our options down to one apartment complex in Madison and a condo near Research Park, so we visited both of those during the same week as the home inspection. The condo was actually not much smaller than our house, had a 2 car garage, and a sunroom that we could have used as a playroom or office if we wanted. We thought we probably could have fit all of our stuff into it and wouldn’t have needed to put anything into storage. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. I won’t go into all the details, but we are pretty sure we were lied to and discriminated against by the realtor in charge of renting the condo. Her husband was the “owner” and builder/developer of other condos in the same area, so it wouldn’t have been a good situation to have them as our landlords anyway. I think it was probably for the best that it didn’t work out, but the condo itself would have been a perfect fit for us I think. Oh well! We ended up going with the apartment complex in Madison. More on that later! :)
The next day after the inspection, the girls decided that Buzz and Jessie needed to go swimming. Not sure why they felt the need to add all the grass and leaves in there too, but hopefully their Toy Story friends didn’t mind too much!
Wednesday, June 7th – 23 weeks along :)
Storytime!
After leaving the library, we went to the nearby playground for a few minutes…
…before going on to the grocery store! I’m trying to appreciate these days while they last where we can run multiple errands in a row without anyone needing to nurse or nap. Those days will be coming to an end very quickly!
We spent much of the morning of Friday, June 9th playing outside. All of June, I tried as much as possible to get the girls outside to ride bikes, play on the swingset, and do the things that I knew we wouldn’t get to do as easily once we moved.
Another activity on the bucket list was going on walks around the neighborhood. The girls love to eat lunch in the stroller while we walk, so we made sure to do that too!
The same day, we finally got the results of the home inspection and the request for repairs from the buyer. We were a little nervous about what to expect since the inspector had spent so much time at our house. The short story is that he found 12 different categories that needed attention (some with multiple items per category). A few of them weren’t too surprising and one we expected: things like fixing the shower diverter in the guest bathroom (it was stuck, so you couldn’t turn on the shower) and fixing the bathroom sinks so they would drain better. Those items weren’t too shocking. But, don’t even get me started on some of the other things on the list. He noted that some of the light switches in the garage had unknown function. Apparently, he didn’t know how to flip one of the switches because it turned the lights on IN THE GARAGE. The other one controlled the exterior lights around the garage, which are set to only turn on at dusk (so duh…they aren’t going to turn on if you flip the switch during the daytime). Another one of the other dumb ones on the list was “the main entry door is difficult to open and close and will require adjustment and/or repair by a qualified specialist.” It’s a wonder we ever had any guests over to our house since apparently the front door doesn’t work properly…haha. What a joke. We’d never noticed a problem with the door for the last 6.5 years, and I’m still not sure what the inspector was talking about. Who knows! He also noted “loose drywall tape” in the skylight in the kitchen as being a “cosmetic” problem. I guess he forgot that our house was built in 1994…not exactly brand new! ;) Can you tell the inspection was sore subject (and still is, if I think about it too long!)?
The worst one of all was that the inspector claimed that the emergency float switch on the air handler in the attic wasn’t working properly. Travis took care of “fixing” as many of the items on the list as he could, but we felt like we needed to get an HVAC technician to come out and look at the float switch since we definitely wanted to leave it in proper working order. Turns out it does work properly…it’s just that there are multiple ways that it can work right, and Mr. Inspector apparently wasn’t educated enough to know that. So, we got to pay a $70 diagnostic fee to the HVAC company for them to come out and tell us that the switch does indeed work like it’s supposed to. Thanks, dude. If you can’t tell, we were less than impressed with this inspector, as well as the buyer’s realtor who LITERALLY copied and pasted every single item (including typos) from the inspection report into the request for repairs. There was no thought given into which items might actually be worth fixing and which ones were just silly…they asked for every single thing to be done. At this point, our own realtor rubbed us the wrong way too by encouraging us to just go ahead and pay a handyman to fix every issue (since they were mostly “small things”) so that we didn’t scare off the buyer. What’s the point of it calling it a negotiation if the seller is expected to just take care of every single repair no matter how insignificant it is? In the end, we ended up going against our realtor’s advice and only agreeing to the repairs we thought were necessary. And guess what…the buyer accepted our response with no argument. We were so happy when that part of the process was all over with…I know it was necessary, but mostly it was just a pain.
Back to the typical pictures of the girls: We got this picture from Savannah’s Bible class teachers….doesn’t it look like a mugshot? Haha! Most people outside of the family are doing good to get a smile out of her ;)
More playtime outside!
Counting down the days until closing was sad but exciting at the same time :)
Quotes and Notes from Early June:
- 6/5/17 – Brooklyn: “How is old is Daddy today?” Mommy: “He’s 31.” Brooklyn: “How old will Daddy be next year on his birthday?” Mommy: “He’ll be 32.” Brooklyn: “WHEW! He’s growing!”
- Brooklyn says when her eyes are wet, that means she’s ready to go to sleep. So whenever we tell her it’s time for bed, she will frequently respond, “But my eyes aren’t wet!”
- A favorite movie at our house right now is Sleeping Beauty. The girls love the songs from the movie, and it’s funny to listen to them (especially Brooklyn) try to sing the words that they obviously don’t know. Example: “And I know it’s true that PIGEONS (‘visions’) are seldom all they seem…” :)
- 6/5/17 – Savannah is just starting to say two and three word phrases every now and then: “Pees Mommy” and “Night night babies”
- 6/6/17 – Brooklyn slept until 8:45 AM today. Pretty sure that’s a new record for this girl!
- “Mawn-mo” – Savannah’s word for “lawnmower”….and she talks about them all the time because she’s scared to death of them!
- Brooklyn is very interested in writing her letters now. She’s basically teaching herself how to write through workbooks. I haven’t really been involved that much, but it’s neat to see how much she can pick up on her own.
More from the last half of the month of June coming soon!
