Posted By Andrew on July 23, 2010
I noticed that Gabe’s trousers were sagging rather badly. Upon closer inspection, I realized that his pockets were loaded well beyond the manufacturer’s suggested capacity. Here is what he was carrying around all day:
Posted By Andrew on July 3, 2010
Gabe simply adores his little brother and begins every day by bounding out of bed and racing to find him for a bit of morning affection.
This one captures his cheerful personality quite well. He’s not as calm as we had convinced ourselves he was going to be 
but he is generally jovial about life, even with an intense interest in everything that happens around him.
Posted By Andrew on June 26, 2010
I thought I had set my photo album on Facebook to be publicly accessible, but several people without a Facebook account have told me the photos cannot be accessed. In case you missed them, here are a few interior pictures of the house we’re buying.
Posted By Andrew on June 22, 2010
No, we haven’t forgotten that you wanted to see updated pictures of Jeremy. We’re so busy just enjoying him that we don’t often remember to take photos, but here are a few recent shots.
He seems a little skeptical about dressing up for church.
Jeremy loves bath time and gets very calm and snuggly after a warm dip.
Posted By Andrew on June 21, 2010
We’re moving. A week ago we thought that a move wouldn’t come for another two to five years, and today we have our new home under contract. Whew! We had recently concluded that our growing family would eventually need a larger house and more land, and we had also agreed that a third addition to our current house was out of the question, but we hadn’t even planned to start looking yet.
We’ve made several small investments in real estate in the past year, and assumed that when we sold those rental properties, we’d be ready to start looking for our next house. Well, last Wednesday the 16th we closed on one of those properties, selling it to our good friends and renters, the Demrovskis. On the way home from the closing, I suddenly remembered that just the evening before, I had seen a new property show up on a foreclosure listings app that I have on my iPhone. Since the property was only a few hundred feet off our route home, we stopped in briefly to see it and evaluate whether it was another potential rental investment.
It was love at first sight. Just a few hundred feet off the state highway, but completely hidden from it by a strip of forest, it seemed to have both the convenient location and the privacy we wanted. At nearly four acres, the lot size was more than twice our current property. There were mature shade trees, and some respectable attempts at landscaping, both of which are rare and valuable in this neighborhood. A lovely porch ran along the entire front of the house, a feature Elizabeth and I always said we’d put in any house we built. There was a large screened-in back porch, a small fenced play area in the back yard, a big oak tree that invites growing boys to build a tree house, and several sturdy outbuildings in good condition.
I contacted the realtor almost immediately, and we met her the next day for a tour of the premises. As we stepped through the front door for the first time, I had a curious and overwhelming sense of deja vu, of coming home to a familiar place. I immediately spotted several more features that we always said we’d build into our dream house, including a great room with a cathedral ceiling, a stone fireplace, lots of natural light from large windows and dormers, and a master bed/bath on the main floor. The more we explored, the more we liked it, and at the end of the tour we made our offer. There was a bit more dickering back and forth, but on Monday the 21st, five days after our first glimpse of the place, the realtor informed us that we had a deal and we could close on it by July 2.
Yes, our heads are spinning a bit, but we’re still young and adventurous and we welcome this challenge. Compared to the last few properties we bought, the repairs and remodeling required on this one are very minor, and we could move within weeks, although we’ll probably take a little longer just to keep it all easy and free of stress. At this point we don’t know whether we’ll rent or sell our current home, but are confident God will send someone who will appreciate and benefit from the thousands of hours of work we’ve invested here.
We don’t yet have the key to the house, so we can’t post pics from inside, but here are a few snapshots we took this evening as we were going out to dinner to celebrate the occasion.
The porch where we’ll sit and drink lemonade, sweet tea, yerba mate, coffee, or apple juice (organic of course), depending who is visiting that day. You know which one you’ll get, don’t you?
View from the side. Dining area inside the bay window, screened porch on the back.
Garage/workshop on left, while the right side will probably become my office. A lean-to runs along the entire rear, so we’ll finally have a place for the lawnmowers, tillers, trailer, garden tools, etc.
When we bought our first SC property in 2001, it had a few pines and scrub oaks, but no attractive shade trees. This one has two beautiful maples right in front of the house, plus a large live oak that conceals the house from the county road at the end of the lane, plus another maple and a very large oak in the back. I still can’t believe it…
