So… WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!  :D

We started looking at houses 2 weeks after we got back from Italy because Ri recently got promoted to a new position in Auburn. Originally we moved down to Puyallup because this is where his work took us, and now we are no longer bound by his job location, we thought we should move closer to Seattle, and our options are to rent or to buy. Both set of our parents had, at one time or another, prompted us to settle down and buy a house, so we started to look at Renton. Renton sits at the Southern convergent point of Seattle and the East side, and it also has a thriving retails market, which makes it an ideal point in terms of location. We found a real estate agent name Sue, a real motherly type woman, who has been very helpful. In fact, it was her who first suggested us to look at Maple Valley, a lot more in our price range than Renton, and surprisingly has an outstanding Tahoma school district, the second best in Washington State. We visited Maple Valley once, and we fell in love with the community almost immediately.

We met with Sue and looked at a dozen houses on one single Saturday. We narrowed our search to the confines of the Tahoma school district, and had to eliminated many many good choices due to the proximity to the high wattage power lines. We love the hardwood floors on the first floor and carpet on the second, we love that there are a back yard to garden, and also love the kitchen to living room open floor plan, which is almost EVERY HOUSE. After a whole day of searching, on our way out of Maple Valley, we stumbled across this new community still in the process of being built by accident because we were trying to find a turn around point. Unfortunately, it was after 6pm so the office was closed. We came back the next day, and visited the model home and it was love at first sight (for me anyway). Here are the floor plan.

It has 3 bedrooms with a loft and a den and a very spacious garden. We lined up last Saturday as 5 of the lots opened up for sale since the afternoon prior and slept in the car for the night. The office opened up at 10am and we were the first one in line, so we get the first pick of all the lots! After the initial agreement, we received the entire 68 pages of contracts in DocuSign, and had to go through every page one by one. Now let the rest of the procedures begin! Loan application, loan interview, upgrades at the design center… etc. Ohh dear, there are so many little details to pay attention to, but it is also quite fun because I get to do all these with Ri, it’s like a partnership and it feels good to be a team. Not to mention because it is a new construction, we basically can customize everything in it. :)

The only down side is that the house won’t be finished until April of 2015. >_< But hey, I guess that give us plenty of time to decide things. So stay tuned! I’m sure there will be more posts about our new house to come! And mark your calendars to prepare for our housewarming party next year in the Summer! To end this good news post, I offer you an imagery of two love birds building a nest together and maybe (in the words of LL) we will start putting some chickies into our new nest! :D