Saturday, April 24, 2010

Dubuque, IA- My Ninth Home

About 1 year after moving into our house, my husband accepted a position with a new company. His new position was in sales, covering the states of Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota. We were not required to mvoe for the position, but felt that moving closer to an airport would be beneficial. We also found out soon after that we were pregnant with our first child. With Randy on the road frequently for work, we decided that it would be best to be close to family so that I would not be so isolated and so that we would have assistance close by if needed. Needless to say our families were very excited when we told them. I remember meeting my mom and sister one Sunday to go to a few open houses and telling them that we needed to look for something that would be move in ready as we only had nine months to prepare. They both started screaming and jumping up and down! Though we started looking immediately, we didn't buy anything for 5 months, as we were waiting for our home in Grinnell to sell. In January when my younger brother moved back in with my mom (where we had been living) we decided that we needed a place of our own. We found a house that I absolutely loved (Randy was just glad it would be ours) and made an offer, even though there seemed to be no prospects for selling our previous home. Our offer was accepted and we moved into the house in January 2007 (about five months pregnant). Moving in was pretty easy as we left most of our furniture at our other house so that it would "show" well whenever the realtor held open houses. Fortunately we had an offer and moved completely out of the house by April, just in time to have my baby shower and finish getting the house together before the baby came.

The home was a ranch with a mostly finished basement and one car garage. It had a beautiful limestone fireplace in the living room and hardwood floors in the living room, hall and master bedroom. It was about 25 years old, but the previous owners had already done some of the expensive remodels- tile floors in the kitchen/ dining room and bath as well as new stainless steel appliances. Over the next two years we updated the main bath (new sink and toilet to replace the yellow ones), tiled the remaining two bathrooms, installed carpet and trim in the two basement bedrooms, and painted giving the house our own touch. Soon after we had our second child, my son, in 2009, we decided that it would be best to sell our house and move to the Quad Cities where there was a larger airport. I loved the house and did not really want to leave the place where we brought both of our children home from the hospital, but my husband was never going to have those feelings about anything (besides the kids and I, hopefully). We listed our house and began making plans to build the house of our dreams on a lot that we had purchased about 1.5 years ago. Though there was a ton of interest in the house, we had trouble finding a buyer because of the one car garage and being landlocked (no room to add on a second car garage), understandable since that was my husband's biggest gripe about the house. Eventually, we found a buyer and worked out an agreement. We moved out of the house in July 2009 and moved in with my in-laws while we worked on building our dream house.

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