Total Loss & Total Gain

Good news, the car wreck insurance mess is over! Bad news, our car did end up getting totaled. Back to good news; the insurance company paid us way more than we expected for our totaled car. So for now, Justin will be driving my mom's car until we find a new one. We have a friend who is a car broker and is working on finding us a deal. Luckily, with the insurance settlement check, we should hopefully be able to avoid a car payment on a "new" car.

So, that was the "total loss". And now for the TOTAL GAIN. Drumroll........... We put an offer on a house and it got accepted!!!!! WE'RE GOING TO BE HOMEOWNERS!!! (We're super excited, in case you couldn't tell)

It's in Maricopa, Arizona (about 30 minutes south of Phoenix)

4 bedrooms

3 bathrooms

2528 sq ft (big, I know, but we'll grow into it)

granite countertops, loft, vaulted ceilings.....

Overall, awesome :)

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Quick story about how we found it. Last weekend we made a trip to look at houses. We had us, Carrie, my parents, my grandparents, and my little brother with us. It was a slightly exhausting trip. We spent a few hours looking at houses that just weren't for us. I felt like the day was wasted. I was bummed. We had to skip a few that we had planned on seeing because we had to get back to town by a certain time. One of the ones we had to skip was this house.

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So Monday, we decided that my dad (our realtor) and I would just go see a few houses by ourselves. It was getting tiring to try to coordinate schedules so everyone could go (at least both of us and my parents).

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We took a few minutes of video on my dad's phone walking through the house. So far, this is all Justin has seen. I was sooooo excited about this house when we got back home, that we wrote up an offer that night. We just "bought" a house that Justin has never been inside of before! How trusting of him :)

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Anyways, we've been sitting on pins and needles since Monday night waiting for a response. My dad kept in pretty good contact with the selling realtor, but the news just kept on being, "It looks like it's going through, we're just waiting on someone higher up"... When 5:00 came today, I thought, "Oh no... now we have to wait over the whole weekend to hear anything official..." Well, the selling agent called my dad at 5:15 and gave us the good news! Hallelujah! What a long weekend it would have been!

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Not that we necessarily need anything else to smile about at the moment, but just because we can, here's a few pictures of Carrie from yesterday. She's learning to turn and pose/smile for the camera now.

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Her favorite place in my parents' kitchen, playing with the plastic utensils.

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Helping Great-Grandpa Joel unload the dishwasher... Good thing she's a featherweight ;)