Introducing... Lady Eleanore!

As if buying a house wasn't enough stress for us, we now have a puppy.

Lady Eleanore Chailey Ilbery has officially survived her first night with us.

I am not going to lie, I am still a little apprehensive about having a dog since we want to travel and aren't home a lot of the time already. But, this dog needed a home and Micah has wanted a dog for a very long time...so we adopted her.
Before coming to us yesterday, she had been an outside dog, so needless to say, she needed a bath. (Or 2) She was so well behaved! She didn't fight us at all, and didn't even shake herself out when I let her out of the tub.

 She has also shown us what a smart girl she is, because we left her in our fenced yard while we went to dinner and she was gone when we got back.

45 minutes later, we found her down the street, cuddled down in someone's cellar. But! We found her, and we met some of our neighbors who joined in our search for her.

Another reason we were worried about getting another animal was because our cat, Atti,  hates everything. So you can imagine how the cat meeting the puppy for the first time went... if you can't imagine, here is my hand.

That was yesterday, today has been...not much better.

This morning, I looked for Atti for 15 minutes before Micah finally found him. Do you see him?

 Ellie is curious about Atti, but the one time she tried to get near him, he hissed and spit and jumped halfway up the wall. So...we will see how this ends up!

Moving pains: Part 3

..And boy, do I mean PAINS. You would think we would have this game down by now.. we moved from my hometown of Salem last June so that Micah could go back to school at SIUE. Then in January we had to move apartments because of my tree allergy, and now, 6 months later, here we go again. This will be the third time in a calendar year that we have moved.

Boxes, boxes, and more boxes. Atticus is in kitty-heaven with all these boxes to climb on and empty boxes to sit inside.

This time, I've gotten creative with my box labels :)

We were definitely more prepared for moving day this time, versus last time when we moved in January. Micah and I are both so sore today, and I would imagine my in-laws are feeling the same. 

It seems that this move has been more overwhelming than the last two, and we have the amount of stuff. We haven't bought..well, anything, more than what we had, but for some reason this time it was really tiring. 

As you can see, Atticus adjusted well. And I mean that sarcastically. I brought him over in his pet carrier and opened it for him and he sat in the carrier for over an hour until I dumped him out of it. He has calmed down a little bit overnight though. 

I am happy to report that we had NO injuries yesterday, (which is an accomplishment with us), so we figured something was bound to go wrong soon. And sure enough, last night we found out that our toilet is leaking. The shut off valve to the toilet spews water if you turn it, so we rubber banded the toilet lever up so that it would quit constantly running water and costing us money. 

This is frustrating because we asked the sellers to have a licensed plumber fix the pluming as part of our negotiations. Granted, they may have, and this is a new issue. So...good thing we didn't need to use the bathroom last night..and LUCKY FOR US my father-in-law can fix literally ANYthing, and he is coming this afternoon :) 

**Funny side note: they took the shower rod with them, so last night, at 11pm when we got ready to shower and realized we couldn't hang the curtain, we looped the shower curtain on a towel hanging hook and took turns holding the other side of the curtain for each other *

As for our first night of sleep in our new home: Micah (and Atti) slept great! I, however, woke every few hours. 

I didn't take many pictures yesterday, but here are a few. I did get most of my kitchen put together, and there are tons more boxes to unpack and find homes for, but we have all week to figure it out. 

They left this pink chandelier in one of the bedrooms, naturally, this will be Noah's room :) he will LOVE it. 

House-warming is June 4th, so that will be my motivation to get things cleaned put away. 

...then after that will come paint and a few "us" touches to make it ours. But that will come in time. 

We bought....a house!

Back on April 20th, we (very exitedly) got a call from our real estate agent saying that our offer had been accepted! We had officially taken the first step to buying our first house!

Ok, so let's back up a little bit. We decided to start our house hunt in late March, as we were having trouble finding a new place to rent once our lease expired May 31st. The main issue we were running into was this: for our current landlords we had to give 3 months notice. Most other places only require 30 days notice, so the places currently for rent wouldn't save us a place 3 months out, and likewise, things that WOULD be for rent weren't listed. We didn't think we could afford to buy a home, since we are paying for Micah's school out of pocket (we don't like debt.. so no student loans for us). We sat down and talked about it one night and decided that we would be here for atleast the next four years. Three more for Micah to finish school and one for him to complete his internships.

The first place we saw was a little two bedroom one bath home built at the turn of the century. I love old houses. I think they have so much charm and when kept up, are just amazing. The only issues with this home was that we wanted three bedrooms and when we went into the unfinished basement, there was a furnace straight out of 1956. I wish I had taken a picture.

We saw around 10 houses, and we quickly learned that the market in Edwardsville is in high demand. Out of the 10 properties we saw, I'm going to say 7 of them sold before we had time to think. Several sold before we could even go LOOK at them. We would set up appointments for the afternoon and the realtor would call at lunch and say "sorry..."

So when we saw this place, we knew we had to act fast. This house was built in 1946, and had the original hardwood floors and windows. (they are double paned now, but the originals are still there). The basement is unfinished, but is water tight and ready to be finished.

 We left the property talking about where we would out things and how we would lay it out. This was the first home that we both liked, so after about an hour and a half of talking and weighing the pros and cons, we put in an offer. Turns out, the sellers got 3 offers that day, and I guess it was meant to be because THEY CHOSE OURS!

After the house inspection and more negotiations, we had an official acceptance and tentative closing date of May 30th.

The rest has been a stressful fog. We started  our loan with a major, nationwide bank. (If you really need to know which one, message me and I'll gladly tell you)  who ASSURED us that they could get us pushed through in the months time that we needed to close before our lease was up. After sending in most of the documentation they asked for, they sent us a loan application and...it was wrong. They had put the wrong information on the application. I called them to get it figured out, and our loan officer had went on vacation and wouldn't be back until the middle of May. SERIOUSLY?! Well, I'm not signing something like this with it being wrong.

We called our realtor (I'm near tears at this point from being so stressed out) and he directed us to a local lender. At this point it's already May and so far this process has been a nightmare.
I was exhausted.
I was worried.
I was tired of fighting with the bank.
I was cranky because of all three of these things...
But!
This new company has been nothing but wonderful, and we got the all clear to close May 20th and we closed on Friday, May 27th. (Today!)

Signing my life away and getting debt hasn't been fun, but in this case it was necessary and I will say:

I'm looking forward to being able to hang things on the wall and being able to paint and make a space that can be mine.

I am also looking forward to not hearing people stomp around above us at all hours of the night.

Or worry about if our music is too loud.

Or when the boys play video games into the late hours and scream at the TV- we don't have to worry about being complained about. (They just need to worry about waking ME up and serving the consequence of that :) )

I have had people re-assuring me and telling me that in the end it's all worth it. I am sure they will be right. I have definitely missed having my home. Renting was a good experience overall because now we know what that's like. ..and we know it's not for us.

We LOVED our realtor, Payton, and our lender, JR. They were both amazing and helped us through this process. I feel like they were honest and straightforward with us. 

They even had a colored pencil sketch made of our home for us, so we will always remember our first home. 

In fact, this drawing was the first thing we took inside an otherwise empty house :)

I'm sure there will be more pictures later, but for now, we have a very busy day of moving ahead of us. I don't know how Atti will adjust to another new place, but we will find our very soon!

We still don't know how long we are going to be here, it will depend on Micah's job once he gets done with school, but here's to atleast 4 years of memories in our new (to us) house!

SOOO Much Moisture!

Alright everyone- Instead of making an extremely long social media post, I thought I'd just make a blog entry to ask for your help.

Our apartment is on the bottom level of our three story building, and the building is partially built into the side of a hill. As a result, more than half of our apartment is underground and poorly ventilated. We have two windows, one in the living room and on the same side, one in the office.

Since it has been raining for the last week, our humidity level in the apartment has gone from moderately annoying to...STICKY, damp, un-bearable-ness.

Our kitchen floors are sticky

Even the cat doesn't like to walk across the linoleum right now

Our carpet is damp-talk about a gross feeling.. I've been wearing house shoes so my feet don't touch the carpet

When I get dressed in the morning my clothes are damp

We can't sleep at night because our sheets feel damp...

I walk into the apartment when I get home from work every day and feel like it's dirty because it smells musty..but I can't mop the floors because that would bring even more moisture into the air

The worst part is the damp socks.

We have one ventilation fan in the bathroom that we leave running all day, I have tried burning candles in hopes that the flame would dry up some of the moisture (sadly all this has done is make our apartment smell like a musty bakery/coffee shop)

We have one small de-humidifier I keep on constant run in our bedroom, and it does a fantastic job doing what it's supposed to, but it's so small it can't keep up.

Our A/C unit has a fan option that we have been running trying to help get the moisture out, and that has seemed to help some but not a whole lot..

What else can I do? I don't want to buy a bigger de-humidifier because our lease us up in 2 and a half weeks and I hate to buy something expensive that we don't know if we will need in our new place..


Any ideas?! I'm open to anything at this point.

The only good thing about all this rain- my garden is loving it!

Illinois: Not just Chicago- Part 1

When someone asks "where are you from" and I tell them "Illinois", many times they will ask some form of "oh, how far is that from Chicago?" As someone growing up in downstate Illinois, it is frustrating to see that our state tourism only lists Chicago when appealing to tourists--like there is nothing else worth doing in the whole entire rest of the state. Yes, Chicago is worth seeing; and yes, most of the rest of the state consists of farmland, but Illinois has so much more to offer! We have weird museums, road-side attractions (that are actually WORTH seeing), zip-lines, and some BEAUTIFUL State Parks where you can picnic, horseback ride, kayak, hike, camp, and even explore a few caves. Since we can't travel out of our own country this year, we have decided to make the most of our area and explore everything that we can!

So my husband and I have decided to find small towns to visit and obscure things to do, right here in our own backyard. Having been working hard for over a month now on something big (I can't share quite yet what it is...soon though!!!) we were ready to take a day and go do something just the two of us.

So today, we used this GORGEOUS, sunny Saturday to visit Grafton, IL. Seated on top of the Mississippi River, we opted to take the Great River Road to this small, historic town.

I have had heard people mention this trip to us a couple of times now in the year that we have been living over here, but we had never really had the time or the curiosity to do it. The Mississippi River on one side of you, and the rocky cliffs on the other make this 20 minute drive a very enjoyable one as you wind around the banks of the Mississippi River. 

We drove through downtown Grafton, passing a few little restaurants, and antiques store, and an ice cream parlor. Just outside of the main drag, at the top of a huge hill is Aerie's Winery. At the bottom of the hill is Grafton Winery, and across the street is another little winery, but we chose Aerie's because it was at the top of the hill and I knew that they had an outdoor observation deck. Aerie's also has cabins available for rental as well as a zip-line tour, which we decided against doing today, although my husband and I did zip-lines in the Dominican Republic and he loved them. 

Now, I don't recommend eating here if you are super hungry, as their portions are "lunch sized", but I had the Spinach Salad (pictured below) and it was delicious! It was spinach leaves, candied walnuts, goat cheese, raspberry vinaigrette, and dried dates. 

You can't beat the view! And we got there are just the right time because they had a table open right in the front row of the deck, and as we were leaving we walked back through the winery to a large group of people waiting to be seated outside. 

I mean, how could you not love this view of the Mississippi River?

We sat enjoying the view for about an hour and decided that we should probably go and let someone else enjoy the table we were at, as well as my skin is fair and I didn't want to get a sunburn. 

So we headed back down the winding road back to the river's edge and took the same route back home. The view was even better coming back.

I would love to go back to Grafton and walk though downtown. At only a 40 minute drive from our current apartment, we could certainly take a day to appreciate this small little town. (If nothing else, we can go try out the other wineries!) We had other plans to stop in Alton, IL on our way back, but what we had planned was closed today :( but that's alright! Gives us an excuse to go back that way. 

I have already been researching our next area of Illinois to visit, but if you have any suggestions please let me know! I love hearing from others on places they enjoyed visiting! (again, please nothing in Chicago, as this is the point of us exploring the REST OF our state in greater depth) But I am excited for the weekend trips that are in our near future. Luckily for me, my husband is amazing and doesn't mind driving or doing random things :)