We’re moving!

We decided it was time to try something new, so we’re making a big move to North Carolina to try out some Southern living! Daddy is moving with his job into a new position, and we’re excited to be moving to a new family-oriented neighborhood!

There are SO MANY steps to selling our house and buying a new one, and Mommy & Daddy have been REALLY busy the past 4 months! We signed up with an awesome realtor here, and she’s helping them walk through the process!

 

First order of business was to get the house ready to sell and get it on the market! Here is our listing if you want to check it out:

http://www.trulia.com/property/3223355324-2-S-Gifford-St-Butler-NJ-07405#photo-1 

We were pretty excited when the sign went up and the house went up for sale on January 14!

We had only 3 weekends of open houses and someone put an offer in that we accepted! Mommy was SO glad, because she was already getting tired of keeping the house clean all the time!

After our house went under contract, Mommy flew down to NC to find us a new house, and Daddy followed her down a few days later to see her top picks… Can you believe it was only the 2nd house Mommy saw that she fell in love with? We will be living in the town of Apex (although TECHNICALLY it’s within the city limits of Holly Springs), and the downtown and shopping in the area looks really cool!

When they flew into Raleigh (that airport will be about 30 minutes from our new house), they flew over all the different subdivision neighborhoods… you can see each little section, most with their own pool & rows of homes on cul-de-sacs. Apex was even named the #1 place to live in the country a few years back, and it’s still on the top 10 charts for where to live in NC!

 

Downtown Apex has cute shops, with brew pubs, a wine bar, a used bookstore, antique shops, and quaint restaurants. We will have fun exploring there!

Mommy’s favorite place she’s found so far is a little french cafe in Cary… She’s had a few special treats from there already and can’t wait to take us!

 

She also said we’ll LOVE “Rise Biscuits”…  A great place to go for donuts in the morning!

Our new house is in the neighborhood of “Woodcreek”, and you can see where our house will be in the back of the neighborhood (where the blue dot is). The house is on a “t” street that ends in cul-de-sacs on both sides so we will be able to go out and ride our bikes! There are 20-30 kids our ages on that one block alone! It’s going to be awesome!

Here is the floorplan of our new house (and Mommy’s crazy number packing system, which we’ll tell you more about later!)

Here is the front of the new house: The houses are close together, but we actually have a nice backyard that is backed by woods (which is hard to find in these developments)!

There’s a cute little front porch that Mommy can sit on and watch us ride our bikes:

We have a red front door on the new house too!

When you first walk in the door, you will find Daddy’s office (he will be working from home most of the time, so this was a MUST have in the new house!)

Past the office, you walk into the dining room area: If you stay to the doorway on the right after that, you will find a guest room and bathroom, and the doorway to the left leads into the kitchen.

The downstairs guest room:

Downstairs bathroom:

The kitchen! Mommy loves it the island, the eat in area & the openness into the family room!

And of course we all love the fireplace in the family room!

Off the eat in kitchen area, we have a screened in porch and a grilling deck outside. Mommy can’t find pictures of the backyard, but we’ll take some when we move… there’s also a little brick patio area in the back that has an awesome fire pit in it, and there shoul dbe plenty of space for our swingset!

 

Back in the house off the family room, there is a little mudroom with a door to the 2-car garage, and it even has an awesome chalkboard wall!

 

Heading upstairs…

At the top of the stairs is our new playroom:

And down the hall is the laundry room & large linen closet (Mommy is so happy she doesn’t have to bring the landry downstairs anymore)!:

 

The first bedroom will belong to the girls, which we’ll have to repaint… We weren’t thrilled to find out there wouldn’t be room to separate our bunk beds, but we said it was ok when we found out we would get our own bathroom IN OUR ROOM!

 

The next room is our second guest room that will probably double as Emily’s “dressing room”. That way she’ll have a little space to her own too!

Down the hall from that will be Ben’s room:

And the upstairs bathroom that he will use:

Back down the hall and across from the stairs is Mommy & Daddy’s “retreat”. They are SO excited to have their very own space finally!

Their bathroom is the size of the room they have now!

And don’t even get Mommy started on her new closet! It could be another bedroom!

If you thought all of that wasn’t enough, there is also a FULL, unfinished basement! Someday we’ll make a little media room down there, but for now, it will be a lot of storage and a workshop for Daddy!

As awesome as the house is, check out the community pool we will have! It has a huge pool with a swim team, a huge waterslide, a lazy river, a gym in the clubhouse, and TONS of community activities for us to enjoy throughout the year. It’s going to be awesome!

So, when Mommy & Daddy came home, we decided we needed to kick packing into high gear! Mommy has a friend who is hooking her up with free boxes!

And she’s come up with quite a system for the move: Each level of the house has a color, and each room has a number, so the movers will know where everything goes! Her file folder system is pretty impressively organized too! The movers are either going to love her or hate her…

 

Before our open houses, Daddy got a storage unit in town to “declutter” the house, and we filled that up in no time, so at least we had a little jump start on packing!

Every morning we get up, Ben asks if we’re moving to our new house yet, so we made him a chain so he could remove one link every day before we leave… He still asks, but understands a little better now! It’s going to be a LONG 54 days until we leave NJ…

We’ll kepp you updated as more things happen with the move!