Moving day is June 12th

We just received word that our new house will have its certificate of occupancy by the end of next week, which means moving day will be here 2 weeks sooner than we were planning.

Our New Pad

For those of you who have been following our house hunt, we are happy to announce that we will not be living in a "van down by the river" or under any freeways, but that we will be living in a real home.
Our new house is actually the brown one on the left side of this picture.








The front of our house is slightly different (I will take a picture of it soon), but the floor plan and kitchen are almost identical.
There are still 7 homes in the development that are being finished and once they are all complete we will have the option to purchase our home. Moving day is June 25th!

Priceless

Some of you may be wondering what has come of the aforementioned house we were trying to buy... So here is a brief overview of what we found as we went to inspect the home before finalizing an offer... As you can see from the listing picture it is a cute little house with what we thought to have quite a bit of "curb appeal"... Once inside it was immediately obvious why this reasonably priced home was still without an owner; the first clue should have been that the home had no light fixtures installed... Without lights the home appeared to be a real gem... lol... With a little light from our cell phones we tried to see if there was anything worth coming back to see in the daylight; and then we saw it... the home had been completely redone by some local artists... The kitchen window had been turned into quite the "glass sculpture" and many of the walls had been painted with each artists personal touch. I suppose everything that had been damaged in the break-in could have been repaired, but I just could not get over the creepy feeling that I got when I knew random strangers had been in the house doing whatever they wanted. So there you have it, and so our search continues for our new home.

Maybe this will be ours...

We are hoping to purchase this house if everything works out! It is currently owned by the bank and being sold "AS IS", which is the banks way of saying we will only accept full price offers and you will pay for any inspections or costs. It will end up being a GREAT deal if all the inspections don't turn up too many problems.

Finally Figured Out How To Add Music!

I [Travis] have finally figured out how to add some music to our blog. It took me about an hour to do it. Some of the songs that I put on the blog are about how I feel about Alicia and others are about some of the things that I have gone through with every thing that my family has gone through and the others are just some songs that I really like to listen to. Most of the songs are (yes, country) that is who I am and if it was up to me that is what I would be doing for a career, but it takes alot of money and it is a gamble whether you make money or you lose money. Some days it would be alot of fun sitting on a tractor plowing a field or rounding up cattle with a horse. That is pretty much the life that I had as a youngster on my grandpa's farm, other than rounding up the cattle on with a horse. My life is so much fun being married to Alicia and going to school to become a CPA. It has only taken me almost three years to figure out that is what I really want to do. Any ways, I hope you enjoy the music that I have added as you view our blog and I am sure Alicia will be adding some songs that she likes.

I'm LAME...

The Goldman family has so much to be grateful for since my last two posts... what we thought was impending doom with both cars out of commission has turned out to be a bright spot with a small shadow called car payments... that being said I do have a ton of stuff to post but no good brain cells left to do the posting with... I will try to do much better once April 15th passes us by!

Did I Say BORING...

So maybe I asked for it... Just minutes after publicly announcing what a boring lot we are, we had both of our cars break down. Our poor '97 Jetta has lived long beyond it's expected expiration date, but we were hoping it would last just a little longer. We took it to the car guy in hopes that it would be something relatively inexpensive to fix. Our best judgement told us that it was going to be expensive, but we hoped for the best. Travis has been trying to convince me to get rid of it, but my stubborn, scared of car payments brain said "no, we own a car free and clear and we need to be grateful for it". FYI... when the car guy calls and the first thing he says is we have a really nice car we would sell you for $5000, don't ask how much it's going to be to fix your car. Alas, I did ask and here is what I heard... $4000 to $6000 dollars. Just for perspective... I paid $6000 for the Jetta 7 years ago and it's only worth about $3500 at this point, needless to say we are hoping we get a few hundred bucks on the trade-in.
Car # 2 ... December 2006 we purchased a '84 Volvo from the original owner who is a Volvo mechanic as a just in case car and a little project for Travis; we haven't driven it a lot, but in times of need it has been there for us. On Monday while the Jetta was being prepaired for burial we decided that we had a real emergency on our hands... we had not done our civic duty and voted. The police station where we had to go was about 15 minutes from the house, so we set off to do our duty. Why will a car start at home every time, but when you get to your destination it won't? Needless to say we were stuck, 2 cars in one day; if you've got a record to beat us, we'd love to hear from you. We were rescued by our friends who pulled in just as we were hoping to leave. We were so grateful to be rescued!

I wish I could go back to our AWESOME boring little life.