The month of May (along with the first part of the year) has flown by in the blink of an eye.  In the last two months we put an offer on a home, purchased a home, sold a home, renovated a home, and moved.  We only moved a few miles from our previous home, but for someone whose parents have lived in the same home for the last 30 years, moving has been a huge transition for me. My husband, on the other hand, moved at least six times just during elementary school, and deals with these transitions much differently than I do.

 Taking a breather from “home” work to celebrate Mother’s Day

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We knew with Baby No. 2 on the way, we could definitely use more living space.  And while we were not actively house searching, we fell upon this house and knew even though it was a fixer, we would be getting a fantastic deal.  This would be when my obsession with HGTV began. I’m fairly certain I have seen every episode of Property Brothers, and my fair share of Flip or Flop, House Hunters Renovation, Fixer Upper, and Flipping Vegas. I always thought they made the new homeowners look crazed for dramatic effect, until I realized moving into a fixer upper is incredibly stressful!

I never thought I would be one to buy a fixer, so I guess people can change!  These are some things we looked for in a home now that we’ll be a family of four:

1) Cost – Of course we needed to look at homes within a certain price range, where we wouldn’t be stretching our budget too thin.  Cost of living and real estate is high where we live, so one of the ways we were able to keep our mortgage payment roughly the same was to purchase an older home in need of some updates.  We were lucky to find a steal!

2) School District – We wanted to be in an area with good schools, and so the neighborhood we moved to has a great elementary and middle school.  One criterion we looked at was the academic performance index of each school, and while the high school in our neighborhood is not the best of the best, we decided not to base our decision on the neighborhood high school since we were not sure if this was going to be our “forever home” and the fact that high school is still eleven years away.

3) Commute – Since my husband and I both work out of the house, we did not want to move to a city that would drastically increase our commute time to work.  Southern California traffic can be pretty horrendous, and I was not keen on increasing time spent in the car!

4) Natural Light – I love houses with a lot of natural light, and luckily the house we found has tons of big windows all throughout the house.

5) Yard – Our last home was a town home which had attached neighbors on both sides and no yard.  There was a “community” yard of sorts, which wasn’t really a yard, shared by all of the neighbors in a row of homes.  I really wanted our home to have a space where kids could run around and play, and where we could lounge and dine outside in warmer weather.

6) Space – With Baby No. 2 coming August, we definitely wanted another bedroom and more living space.  Our living space in our previous home could barely fit more than 4 adults comfortably, which meant we almost never were able to have other families over for dinner.  We love having friends over, and we also wanted more space for the kids to play.

7) Parking – With so many homes built so closely together in our area, parking can be a beast, which again also makes it more difficult to have people over.  We wanted to be in a neighborhood with plenty of street parking so this would no longer be an issue.

Being seven months pregnant has also added all kinds of fun to this process, what with my frustrations of being physically incapable of doing very much, and my feelings of urgency and a desire to begin nesting, cleaning, and creating a home and space for my family (and my newest little one, come August).

Luckily, we have been blessed with some very dear family and friends who have given their time and helping hands to help make this process less stressful for all of us.  As luck would have it, it was 104 degrees on the day of our move, and since the house is an older home with no central AC and poor insulation, the temperature inside was just about whatever it was outside.  Just looking at the mountains of boxes in our new living room was overwhelming:

Since there was no way any of us could comfortably sleep inside the house (not to mention the fact that there were no faucets or working appliances installed yet), my mom suggested we book two nights at a hotel to ride out the heat wave, and she offered to watch Toddler Checkers.  Then on our first night in the house, two of my mama friends came over after putting their kids down and worked their magic on unpacking our kitchen.  The night after, we had another two friends come and unpack the rest of it, and then our living room looked like this:

What they did in a few hours would have taken me at least a week to do on my own, in my current condition. Do I have fantastic friends, or what?

Before we left our keys and said goodbye to our first home together, we managed to snap a picture in front of our house:

We spent the last seven years building some wonderful memories in that home, and I am looking forward to the new ones we will make  in our new home.   I’ll be spending the next 10 weeks turning the house into a home and getting ready for baby!

What do you look for in your ideal home?  Did you move during your pregnancy?  Please share your experiences!