Easter

I really enjoy Easter! I spent the holiday at my in-laws, on their farm just outside Parker, SD. The day was glorious. It was sunny (which we have not seen a whole lot of this spring) and around 60 degrees. It was an absolute heat wave! So, after eating too much food, we spent the rest of the day outdoors enjoying the fabulous day.

I hope everyone had a great Easter holiday!

Our Home

My husband and I are homeowners! In January, we started the process of getting approved for a home loan and getting ourselves a Realtor. We also went to many open houses and looked online at houses until our eyes bled.

We looked at around 30 houses throughout the entire process, and it was an emotional ride. We fell in love with a couple houses, only to find out there was already an offer pending before we could even make one. It's hard to not get too invested into a house when you finally find one that works. As fun as it is to shop for houses, it can be stressful as well. It helped that we were not in a huge hurry to find a house, we wanted to take our time and really find the right house to fit our needs.

So we continued to look for houses, and on a random weekend we went to an open house and found a house we absolutely loved. It was a ranch style house, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, deck and patio, a large backyard, fireplace, and three-stall garage. It was pretty much everything we wanted in a house and we fell in love with it. So, learning from our past mistakes, we called out Realtor on a Saturday afternoon and told him about this house. We went back and looked at the house that evening, and by the next morning we had an offer made.

Needless to say, we got the house! We started cleaning the house the first weekend in April and started moving things in after that. We are all moved in now and enjoying having a house. The only thing that could make it better would be some warmer, sunny weather so we could actually enjoy the deck and patio. However we are getting good use out of the fireplace! Here are some pictures of our house.

New Car

A couple weeks ago, I was unfortunate enough to be involved in an accident. I was driving my 1995 Oldsmobile and a car ran into the passenger side of my vehicle. All three panels of the passengers' side of my car are smashed, and the window shattered. Needless to say, my car was basically totaled.

I was pretty bummed about my car, and this all happened on John's Birthday, 5 days before we were supposed to close on our house. So yeah, we were pretty stressed during this time. We did close on the house, and we are getting settled (a future blog, I am just waiting for a nice day to get some pictures!) However, we were stalling on getting a newer vehicle since we had a million other things to worry about at the time.

Thankfully John's grandma had a minivan that was not being used, so I drove that around for a couple weeks. This last week, I have been driving his parents' Saturn View. Last night John and I decided things had settled down enough that we could finally go car shopping.

We had been looking online for a couple weeks, and finally decided to head to some of the dealerships in town and see what we could find. We made a couple stops and headed out to the Fairgrounds where Billion Automotive was having their spring sale. We looked around for quite a while and then found the vehicle that fit our needs.

It is a 2004 maroon Trailblazer. I really like it, and it is nice to finally have my own vehicle back again. So after signing our lives away with another loan, we drove our new vehicle home. It has been a very busy few weeks, but I look forward to blogging about the house and sharing pictures.

P.S. I sure hope this weather warms up a little. Snow in the middle of April is not my idea of spring!!!