Christine's Favorite Things: Arizona, Our New Home

Well we made it to Arizona and finally closed on our house last week. We are still in a vacation rental while we move our things into our new home from the storage unit and have the floors redone. It's hot, but there is plenty of A/C everywhere and I think the heat feels good, unless we're working outside, like lifting boxes, then we're sweating like pigs. We miss Washington and everyone we left. The boys get a little homesick, missing their cousins and friends, but they are enjoying their cousins here and they're making new friends.

Our House Story:

We really love our new home. I just can't believe what a great house it is. Jason searched for a house while me and the boys sold the house in WA and packed up the house. Jason saw many houses in Arizona and I searched hard online for houses for him to go look at. We kept finding houses that already had offers on them, or there would be something we didn't like about a house. When we found "our house" I really liked it and we prayed about it and felt like it was the right house for our family and the right location to raise our boys. But we weren't the only offer and then...we DIDN'T get it. I was so sad! Jason kept searching, but I kept hoping the other house would go back to us. Jason told me, "You need to move on, it's gone", I said, "I know I just really wanted it." Well to make a long story short, I did pray that if it was the right house for us we would still be able to buy it. It was hard to move on but I tried even though we still couldn't find a house that I liked (yes, I'm more picky than Jason, plus remember I only have pictures to go by). Anyways, it had been a couple weeks and we made an offer on a different house that was nice, but I wasnt' in love with it and it was more expensive. The sellers wouldn't budge on their price, so we decided not to make another offer because I kept getting the feeling that this was NOT the right house for us. Then, just a couple hours later Jason gets a call from our realtor that "our house" was ours again. The other buyers has something come up and had to back out. Wow, I was estactic, I was on cloud 9! Now just for the record, I didn't wish anything bad to happen to the other buyers, but this house was meant for us after all.

The Floor Story:

When we saw the house again the Travertine floors looked like they were in worse shape than we originally thought. Jason had called someone before and asked how much it would cost per sq. ft. to have them restored. It was expensive, so we thought we might be better off tearing out the floors and putting down porcelain tile instead, which wouldn't need any maintenance, but it was even more pricey. We were just a day away from the floors being torn out, when Jason and I looked at our porcelain tile samples on the Travertine floors and said what a shame we can't save these floors they are so much prettier than the porcelain tile. BUT then a tile salesman came over and said it looked like the scratches and dullness on the floor was from some kind of wax coating put over the floor. Which is a big mistake on a natural stone floor, because they need to breathe, someone didn't know what they were doing. It was the coating on the floor that was causing it to look scratched and dull, not the actual stone. So we canceled the floor removal and called another floor guy to give us an estimate on restoring the floors, which was a fraction of the cost of the first bid we got, so we hired him and he started restoring them the next day. We are so happy with the floors now and thank our lucky stars we didn't tear them out!

Before: notice the dullness and scratches.