Lots of updates...

Wow, a lot has happened since my last post. The girls graduated kindergarten and their last day of school was May 24th. They were sad that school was over and that they wouldn't get to see Mrs. Abernathy, Mrs. Vollmer, or the office ladies Penny and Nancy anymore. This brings me to one of our big updates. In our school district all the kindergarten classes were in one building (mostly) and then starting in first grade the kids would attend one of the 5 elementary schools, so they won't have a chance to see their teachers in the halls or see the same office staff and likely won't see many of their classmates. Based on our address, our girls would attend Stephen Decatur elementary for first grade. I was not happy about this. Scott and I both said that we had hoped to be moved back to the Mooresville/Monrovia area by the time our kids started school, but it didn't work out that way. Then, once we enrolled the girls in kindergarten at Decatur we said we were going to try to sell our house and move during the school year. That didn't happen either. So, when the end of the school year came and we realized that our kids were going to be enrolled in first grade at S.D. we decided we needed to do something about it.

I decided that since the kids had to start at a "new" school next year anyway, that it was a good time to go ahead and move to a new school district. We had been debating for a long time over whether we thought it would be best for them to be at Monrovia or Mooresville, and we decided that we would be fine with either, but we were both leaning toward Monrovia. We made up our mind that we were going to put our house up for sale during the summer and start looking for houses. Everything from that point on happened so quickly that we've barely had a chance to soak it all in.

We hadn't had the best luck getting preapproval for a new mortgage since our bankruptcy was finished. We kept getting told different things from different people but we couldn't ever get a definite approval from anyone. I decided (mostly out of curiosity) to stop in and check out the housing addition that was started in Monrovia by CP Morgan a few years back. CP Morgan ended up closing and no new homes were built there for a while. I had heard that Wesport homes had bought the properties and were starting to build so I wanted to see what they had to say. That decision set everything in motion.

The day after the girls finished school I took them to their dentist appointment and then drove out to Homestead to get the scoop. Barry looked like he was about to leave until I pulled in and started walking up to the door. I told him that I grew up in the area and we were thinking of moving back. We looked at the model, he gave me several floorplans to consider and asked about our finances and credit. I told him about the bankruptcy that we repaid and our current finances thinking he would tell me that there was nothing he could do for us. He told me about some special USDA financing that I had never heard of and told me that he could get me into a big 2 story, 4 bdrm house for less than we pay now. I thought he was full of hot air, but decided to let him run our credit and agreed to come back with Scott on Saturday to talk more about it. He assured me that he would contact me once he got our credit reports back and let me know how things looked. I got an email from him the next day with our credit reports attached saying that our credit looked great and that we had nothing to worry about.

After much discussion we decided that something about this situation seemed too good to be true, but we would go ahead with it and see what happened since we weren't getting anywhere with other mortgage companies. Barry had mentioned that he knew a realtor that he thought would be good to sell our house if we were interested. So we made arrangements for his realtor to meet us on Saturday when we were scheduled to meet with Barry. Again, I am thinking that things are going too smoothly because I didn't expect both a salesman and a realtor to be so eager to meet with people on the Saturday during Memorial day weekend. But, we went along with it and during the meeting decided to proceed with getting loan approval to build a home in the addition and to proceed with getting our house on the market with the realtor Barry suggested. Ira was with FC Tucker and was supposedly pretty important with the company and teaches classes on how to properly price homes, etc. He asked how soon we wanted to get started because he was leaving on a cruise the following Thursday. We said as soon as possible and agreed to have him meet at our house on June 1st.

More on the next post....