We are excited to announce ...

We have some exciting news to share with you. Something which we have been planning for quite a while - ever since last year in fact - has come to fruition. Oh what could it be. See, now it's exciting for you too. Uhm.

Frank and I have always seen our life together as an adventure. And we love it that way. Sure there are peaks and valleys as in everybody's life. But we are coming up on our 20th anniversary this winter, and we are looking back at mostly peaks. Fun times. Lots of work. Lots of growth. Lots of laughter. Even if some of it was laughing through the tears. Like when we moved to Nebraska from Denmark in 2000 and the dot.com market crashed and we got stranded, quite literally in the middle of nowhere (sorry Nebraska). Jobless and with few prospects.

We pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps. Frank got three job offers within a week (woot!). We picked one, threw all our stuff into a Ryder truck and drove west. We arrived in California after 5 days of driving on packed ice, going 25 miles per hour it seems, in the middle of January.

B joined us that same October on Halloween. Longingly awaited. And it has been the three of us ever since.

The next several years we spent renting and saving our pennies and seven years ago, we were able to buy our fabulous house. We moved in in 2009 and the following year we began a huge renovation that lasted for a couple of years. Then we took a break and in 2014 we updated the rest of the house. Do you feel where this is going?

Even though I still have several spaces to share with you - I already shared some of our newer projects recently - the small bathroom remodel and the finished upstairs hallway, we have finished the remodeling we wanted to do.

Now, we could sit back and relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor. And believe me, we have. We LOVE this house. But.

It is way too big for us. We are only three people despite our best efforts ... So 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms ... Uhm.... A little much?

So last year, we were gunning it to put the house on the market, but then this that and the other happened and we got in too late in the season and decided to wait until this spring.

Here is where our story really begins.

We got our fantastic realtor out (email us for a referral if you are local to South Orange County) and then the photographer came out.

He photographed the whole house and put it on the MLS (Online house for-sale database). It was so much fun to see someone else photograph the house.

He found a great angle from the hallway into the living room that I just love. Here is my version of that:

Even before we knew the house had hit the MLS on a Tuesday evening, we got the first call from a realtor for a showing. Then the calls and texts started pouring in.

We had our first open house. We baked rolls before leaving so the house smelled heavenly.

For three weeks we had 2-3 showings a day on average. Sometimes in the evening too. Then we would head down for a nice walk around our lake.

Several people came out to see the house both two and three times.

Then we got a couple of offers.

Funny story: one of the offers was for a lower price, but without contingencies and larger cash portion, fast escrow and rent-back. The other offer was higher but had a contingency of selling another home. What to do, what to do.... 

We debated and analyzed and slept on it and thought about it some more. Then we decided on the first offer, but still had until the next day to make our final decision. That evening I was out driving and I thought to myself: Did we pick the right offer? It is the more sound offer. It feels safer. The other offer was more money, but so much more iffy. The people with the safer offer were from Florida, so I thought... Let me turn on the radio. If a song comes on by flo.rida, then I just KNOW we made the right choice. Because that is how you make big decisions in life, right?

Well what do you know... not a song by flo.rida. Better... Capital City was singing "Safe & Sound" I kid you not. Here is the first part of the lyrics:

I could lift you up
I could show you what you want to see
And take you where you want to be

And then of course they are singing 'Safe & Sound' a million times.

That totally settled it. I mean could it be any clearer?

We picked that offer and the house went into escrow and then we had our inspections.

The interior inspector praised our house saying if everyone kept their house like we did he would be out of a job. We were missing a screen in one of the windows and a few other minor issues, but that was it.

The roof inspector found some broken tiles on the roof, but luckily we had some spare ones and he fixed it on the spot for $200 bucks.

Then an escrow officer came out to our house with all the paperwork and we signed, and signed and signed some more. They do love their paperwork over here. We signed a stack of paper over half an inch tall.

And I just had to take this picture below on the right. If you are not living in the states, you will get a kick out of this. In any bigger transactions like a house sale or a bank loan, you get the deal notarized with a notary public like in the old days. And get this. You sign with a finger print in addition to your signature over here. Isn't that crazy? And yes, it's true. They (we) still use check books over here too. I just had to document that so you would believe me. Welcome to the 1950s.

Then the buyers came out for their final inspection last Friday and the house was officially sold.

Cheers.

We are renting back the house for the next 30 26 days (gulp) while we find our next adventure.

So here it goes. I see lots of house hunting in our future. We might need to rent something before we find our next landing spot. Maybe we are just going to crash someone's couch. Who knows.

It will be fun. I love to move. And I am going to document our process. Of course.

We are opening ourselves up to the universe to let our next great adventure begin. We are ready!

In the meantime I want to share the rest of the rooms. We have one more bathroom coming up. The game guest room. A finished shot of the dining room. I want to do a before and after of the backyard. I found some pictures from when we moved in and it looks so much different now. Then there is the rest of the office and the reveal of the walk-in closet too.

You can take a tour of our house here with before and afters of what I have shared so far.