Myers' Christmas Update

(I just copied and pasted this from what went out with our Christmas cards to family)           

 So much has happened the past year for us, that I do not believe that we can fit it all into a one page letter! Therefore,  instead of trying to tell you everything, we will give you the highlights of the past year.

In January, we began looking into the possibility of purchasing a home. We found a real-estate agent, thankfully very easily, as we go to church with him. He gave us leads to a mortgage officer and various other places we would need to go. By mid-February, we were pre-approved and official shopping for a home. We looked at around 25 or so homes in total. The last home we fell in love with! We closed April 9th, and celebrated by cleaning and having a picnic dinner in the dining room that night. We officially moved in a week later, with the help of church friends and have been so happy in the house-despite some issues that have come with it.

In June, we celebrated our first year of marriage in our new home. In September, we took a vacation to Panama City Beach, and enjoyed the time we had of relaxation and beautiful weather.

Tim is doing well with his job. His manager is very happy with his work, and Tim is still enjoying is job greatly. In October, I became a Thirty-One Independent Consultant, and I am still doing freelance website design and maintenance.

We are so thankful for the many blessing that God has bestowed upon us. We are now very settled into living in Huntsville, have made wonderful friends, and love our church and the family there.

On other news, we do have a blog. I have not been very good at updating it, but one of goals for 2013 is to update the blog at least weekly. This was you can catch some of the stories that will not make it into our Christmas Letters.

            We pray that you have a wonderful, blessed, and safe Christmas and New Year.                        

Ephesians 1:3

We Bought a House!

As most of you know by now, we bought the house we were under contract for. Not without any issues of course, of which I will give you the short version of in this post.
We put in our request for repairs and the seller agreed to all but one thing, which we accepted. This is were things began to get more interesting and we were thankful we had a 44 day closing instead of only 30 days.
The crew that was doing repairs started a week later than they were supposed to. We came out one day to get measurements of rooms and also to see the progress and at that time were impressed with what the crew was doing. They were also doing somethings we didn't ask for, but had come up on the inspection report. After the they were done working, we came out again to check things out along with our inspector, only to find things we asked for hadn't been completed.
They hadn't done anything noticeable with the crawlspace issues and hadn't fixed all the rotting wood and other things like that. So David called up the selling agent and we were told that they would have people out there to finish it soon. They did everything but the crawl space problems, which we kept getting the run around on. "The ductwork guy was supposed to do that." And things like that.
The week of closing date, (April 9th), we did a final walk through. Not everything had been fixed once again. At this point, Tim and I felt like we should go ahead and sign the final walk through paperwork, and get our own people in to fix the things that were left.
Closing day dawned. Excitement and nervousness filled us up both throughout the day. Then, just two hours or so before scheduled closing, we thought we weren't going to be able to close due to some things that we had just found out we still needed to do. David rescheduled our closing for an hour later originally scheduled. And then we sat at least thirty minutes before signing even begun as they were needing finalized paperwork on things that were being done at the same time.
We did start signing paperwork, even though things had not been HUD approved and final paperwork was still being sent in. Thirty minutes later, everything had come through and had been finalized! We were signing our last signatures before the keys!
Hands were shaken, keys were handed over, and Tim and I were home owners!!
We made phone calls on the ride back to the apartment. Then changed clothes, got Scottie and cleaning supplies and headed out to the house. That night, thanks to Publix, we had a picnic dinner of friend chicken and fixings in our new kitchen!

Life gets in the way

I am rather behind on the post I want to write...so over the next couple weeks I am going to be playing catch up!
There is so much to tell since the last post. Let's hope I can catch up!

Under Contract

We are under contract to purchase a house, and I am not sure that it has fully dawned on me yet. I am very excited, so that's not an issue, but I don't think it will feel like we are until we sit down at closing. We've had a few people ask us, "Why are you buying a house?" The answer is simple really, the time is right. If we were to renew our lease in our apartment, the rent would rise at least $100, interest rates are low, and other reason.

Like our engagement, we haven't rushed into this. We've prayed about it and asked for God's will to be done. Let me tell, so far He has bestowed many blessings on us in this process. We have been blessed with an awesome realtor, who has hooked us up with some another amazing people, such as our mortgage specialist and home inspector.

The house that we are under contract for, was one we never really intended to look at. We had seen it online when we first started looking at house online, but never seriously considered it. We had looked at around twenty houses before this, and had found one we really liked. Yet, that one went under contract before we could draft an offer, so the search continued. We came across this house again online and said "What the heck, the price is good, and we're going to be looking at other houses in the area, so let's just take a look."

It was the last house we looked at that day, and we are so glad we did. I walked into the kitchen, and didn't like it, because I LOVED it. We were concerned with the fact that the history said the house had failed pending twice. We then found out that this was due to lack of funding by the same person. So we continued through the house, liking what we kept seeing.

Later that evening after much deliberating and praying about we, we decided that we wanted to put an offer on the house. We asked for quite a few things- such as seller to pay closing cost, home warranty, longer closing period. The seller gave a counter offer, in which the only thing he changed was the purchase price, so we signed and went under contract.

We had inspection today and over all that turned out pretty well. There are some issues that we are going to ask the seller to fix, but over all happy with what we know.

This so far has been a great experience, and it's only been a week since we put in our offer.

Plus it gives me something to blog about :)

Creatively Writing

I have a love for reading and writing. Getting lost in the made up worlds of the authors, and then coming back to reality. When I read, I get immersed into the book. I will giggle, exclaim, and even get teary eyed. I try to bring that to my writing.

But I miss writing…. You might be thinking “But Ruthe, you’re writing right now and every time you post on this blog.”

That’s true, I am writing, but it’s not the creative writing I used to do. I miss just sitting down and letting the story come out. Throughout high school, you could have asked me to show you a creative writing that I had been working on, and I would have been able to pull out two or three different things.

I used to carry a notebook around with me, specifically for creative writing. It would have fragments of stories I had worked on and different character profiles throughout it. Then stories would show up in my subject notebooks (especially when my attention wandered from class).

There used to be a time that I stayed up till 4 AM several mornings a week researching facts and writing my own fictional stories.

I miss it. The last part of my college career was more writing papers and news stories. Yes, they can be creative, but not the fictional type of creativity.

Along with my other creative projects (sewing, card making, scrapbooking, etc), I am going to try and do more writing. So if you see me about carrying a spiral bound notebook, though that I am carrying it to jot down plots and character profiles.