We sold our house!

So I know I've been totally neglecting this blog over the last few months - believe me, I have blog posts drafted in my head that somehow just never come to fruition.  But this one is here.

Well, we sold our house!  In 24 hours!  

We've moved in with my parents and everyone is settling in nicely.  Brad and I have been going back to our house to continue packing, load up the storage units, patch, paint, clean...until all hours of the night.  

Not to mention the weeks before we listed the house where we were staging the house, selling things, donating things, managing contractors to install new garage doors, power wash the house, put on new shutters, tend to the lawn, etc.

Honestly, I know it is the right move for us to sell our house because we do need more space, and we want to be in a different part of our town, but it's hard not having a house to move into yet.  Oh yeah, and moving with a 2 year old and a 4 year old is HARD!

This is just a sample of what we've brought to my parents house who have so graciously allowed us to move in with no end in sight of when we'll find a house and move out.  Don't worry though, everything has been organized and we are no longer living in chaos.

A young couple is buying our house and I sat down to write them a little note to "hand off" the house to them.  But then I got a little carried away, and kept adding more and more.

We left them a little note:

Dear Cara & Ian,

We are so excited for you to move into this house. Like you, we were newlyweds when we moved in, 6 years ago. We took off running, and started making updates and upgrades to the house. One of our very first projects was to plant the tree in the front yard. When we planted it, it was a baby tree about 10 feet tall. Now it reaches nearly as tall as the house.  We planted it because we wanted the house to feel like a home - it provides shade, its colors change beautifully in the fall, it’s been a home to birds nests, and we’ve watched it grow and change each season.

We tackled the backyard which was an absolute jungle when we moved in. We called it "tree island" which was made entirely of weeds that grew into trees.  We planted baby hydrangea bushes in the far left corner and a row of the beautiful white ones which have taken a couple years to come in.  We hope you enjoy this transformation in the summer and make many wonderful memories in the backyard.

We've painted every single room in the house.  Most of them twice.  In fact, we painted the master bedroom (again) the night before B went back to work after paternity leave.  The two of us and our newborn all slept in the living room that night so we didn't sleep in the fumes.  The dining room went from cream to navy blue to lilac!

We brought two babies home from the hospital to this house - both in snowstorms.  They learned to crawl and walk and talk in this home.  We've spent countless hours scrubbing stained baby clothes at the basement sink.  And washing baby bottles in the kitchen, and cleaning up toys, and...

See the hole for wires on the floor to the right of the fireplace?  L used to drop crayons down the hole when he was a toddler.  We kept going down to the basement to see where they were coming out but they never did!  We're convinced there's a portal somewhere and inexplicably a crayon will drop out of it every once in a while.

G isn't tall enough to look out of the windows yet, but she will get on her super tippy toes and stand on the tiny ledge of the air intakes and pull herself up to see out of the windows.

We hosted our first Thanksgiving, we had our kids' first birthday parties, we quarantined in this house.  We have made countless memories in this house over the past 6 years.  We wish you many years of happiness in your new home.

All the best,
Stacey & Brad Stamm
(and Leo & Gavi too)

We left the note on the kitchen counter yesterday, along with our keys, garage door openers, and all of the smart home devices.  But we couldn't say goodbye without having a little sendoff.  We invited a few friends and neighbors over, and it was just such a lovely time.  We had pizza, fruit, beer, more desserts than you could imagine.  The kids played soccer, frisbee, tag, and climbed a wall we always say not to climb on.  The perfect way to say goodbye to our home.

Goodbye, house!