2008

Jan 2008-- January 1 we woke up at our house in Baton Rouge after staying out all night for our wedding! January 1-3 we stayed at LePavillon in New Orleans. It was soooo cold! We ate fancy food and went out for fancy drinks and shopped in malls we couldn't afford. It was a wonderful mini-honeymoon.

Feb 2008-- We celebrated our first Valentine's Day as a married couple. We decided to skip the eating-out thing and made a fancy dinner at home. I made Scott a book of all the months we'd been together. We had friends over for the neighborhood parade.

March 2008-- We laid low most of March. Can't say much about it.

April 2008-- We went to Maison LaCour for my 25th birthday. We ate some of the best food Baton Rouge has to offer and drank wine and Kir Royales.

May 2008-- I graduated with my Masters. We finally took our honeymoon, to beautiful Maui. We stayed at the Ka'anappali Beach Resort in Lahaina, Maui. We didn't want to come home, but we did.

June 2008-- Because of the state government's hiring freeze, I didn't start working until July. Most of June was spent cutting the grass every five days and trying to do things around the house. It was a little boring at times, but peaceful. I'll always remember it as my last summer before the real world.

July 2008-- We celebrated Scott's 26th birthday with PF Changs. We bought Scott's new car, a 2008 Honda Accord. It was the first time either of us had a car straight off the lot. I started my first job post-graduate school.

Aug 2008-- For the first time, we had a combined income. We did our best to save as much as possible. I bought a 2003 Accord from my mom and she got a new car. With two new cars (ie. cars that don't need repairs) we decided a house was next. Because we'd spent so much on the cars, we needed to get to saving.

Sep 2008-- On September 1st, Hurricane Gustav pounded Louisiana and Baton Rouge. We didn't feel safe in our little house with all of the great big oaks, so we stayed at my mom's house for the night. We lost power for 16 days, and many of them were spent at mom's where there was a generator strong enough to power the fridge and a few small fans and lamps.

Oct 2008-- We dressed up as Obama and Palin for Halloween and went to a party at our
friend Alice's house. I started a new job as a therapist at a high school. Scott interviewed for and was offered an awesome job with AT&T as a Business Account Executive for the Northshore region.

Nov 2008-- Scott started his job the day before he election. What an amazing thing! We stayed up all night and sipped champagne. We decided that we could really afford a house and decided to go for it. We contacted our realtor again and told her we were ready. Thanksgiving weekend, she met up with us to discuss options and look at homes listed online.

Dec 2008-- We found the house and made the offer. We set January 16th, my sister's birthday, as our closing date. We're getting an awesome APR because the rates dropped. Right after we locked in, they went back up.

We're celebrating our anniversary tonight with our friends Ashley and Jeremy. Ashley was one of our beautiful bridesmaids at our wedding, a year ago today. We spent last night playing Monopoly and drinking our favorite beer. Today we took a long walk in our soon-to-be-old neighborhood. We're really really going to miss it here.

Happy New Year :)

our favorite gifts

our AA gift card from mel and jake


my wine cooler from santa (my husband)



scott's digital photo frame from me



our home depot and lowe's gift cards from jonathan and julie, mark and catherine, and mom and jeff


my eco-drive (solar powered) watch from my husband



scott's electric razor from me


and the love from all of you :)

happy holidays from the steads

click here to see our video :)

we got it!!

home sweet home!!

We found out Friday that our offer was accepted. What a relief! We signed the purchase agreement Friday after work and went to a holiday party Friday night. We had such a tough week -- working all day (except for snow day!), looking at homes in the evenings, and working the testing lab at night.

Saturday we spent the afternoon with the loan officer. It took FOREVER! We're both hoping that we don't have to sign that many papers again for a long time... until closing! It's finally setting in that we're moving into our new home in six weeks.

UHHH!!

Just found out that they want another "extension" -- meaning we won't get a response for our offer until 5pm today.

I don't think we're going to let them have another extension if they ask for it... this has already been extended twice.

I can't wait for this to be over!!

snow day

Baton Rouge got about 2" of snow this morning, keeping Scott and I home from work. Who can complain about that??

In about 15 minutes we should hear the response to our offer, and I'm happy we're together for it. I was almost in tears signing the offer -- this is such a big deal for us and we've wanted it (and worked hard for it) for a long time. Thanks to all of the extra time we've put in at work, the weekends we stayed in, and the trips we didn't take, we have been able to save up enough over the past six months to (hopefully) move into a beautiful home!

They say not to fall in love with a home, but it's too late. We weren't even out of the car and I knew it would be home. I can only hope that the sellers are willing to work with us. We didn't ask for much.

Attached are some photos of the snow.
this is not my snowman, but isn't it great?? Our dear friends Tricia and Jason brought Frosty to life in Port Allen, LA.


this was the snowman I made on our porch. He's about 8" tall :)

Now that's more like it

We looked at some older homes today, and found one in Westminster that we really liked. I went to elementary school there, and it's a decent neighborhood that's semi-convenient to our lives.

By really like, I mean we didn't really hate it. It had a big open floor plan and some closet space. It was priced right... about 20,000 less than we expected to spend, and seller told our realtor to "make an offer" no matter what. It's been on the market since April. There was a big back deck and a large yard which we would have loved.

We figured we'd see more homes, but felt good about this one. Many changes would need to be made (a lot of these older homes have bathrooms that have either a shower or tub, not both, and they're really really small) and some we could live with, but some we might not be able to live with (like the bathrooms...)

I should mention that our realtor is a family friend and originally we were looking at newer, more expensive homes, but after watching HGTV we began to believe we could re-do an older home and we'd love it. Knowing what we originally wanted, our realtor brought us by a home that was on the market for 3 hours in a subdivision we liked.

We fell in love, and are going to make an offer tomorrow!

Enjoy.

starting over

We're going to look at another neighborhood today -- Tara. It's a large, established neighborhood in Baton Rouge (which means old, outdated, but still nice).








but you have to have an imagination...
ignore all lace, the large mirror, the cabinets, and strangely painted (or wooden) walls.
notice the floor plan, the fireplace, the large windows.
ignore the carpet and the chandeliers.

i know it's hard to ignore everything, but we'd be buying the shell of the house, not necessarily all of the old lady accents.

disappointment

I'm home from work today, so I thought this would be a good day to start the blog I've been thinking of starting. I'm not sure that I have a lot to blog about... so we'll see.

We've been married for almost a year, and Scott and I are shopping for a home. We've already been disappointed twice -- the two homes we fell for (one an older ranch with a huge yard, one new construction) have either been sold or taken off the market. We spent thirty minutes yesterday in the neighborhood of the ranch-style home, and decided we wanted to see it immediately and we were ready to buy (if we liked) without seeing anything else. Buuutt, it's not going to happen. Oh well.

I guess for now the blog can be about our home. We're thinking we're going to be buying an older home and making improvements... which is something we originally wanted to do. At some point we decided we wanted a brand new home, but we're over that now and are back to looking at older homes on larger lots. I can use this blog to document the progress :)

This is the one we're disappointed we're missing :(