some might be surprised to discover that today we sold the the snowdeal show ® house that we purchased less than a year ago. some might be even more surprised when they discover that we don’t actually have a concrete plan for where we are going to live after the end of april when the new owner takes possession. it certainly cannot be said that we have never lived in interesting times.

a little over a month ago, kris and i decided that if we looked out over the next 6 months to a year that it was looking increasingly unlikely that we’d still be calling grand rapids home. it’s not that it was an impossibility, but given my continued status as underemployed and the abysmal job market in west michigan, we wanted to make sure that if we needed to move so i could take a new job in walla walla that we’d be able to do that without having to worry about selling the house in the real estate “offseason” ( here in the “states” new home buyers start looking for houses in march/april and it’s generally considered to be a savvy move to put your house on the market at the beginning of the selling “season” ).

it’s not unusual for big, victorian homes to sit on the market for 6 months to a year, so you can imagine our, er, surprise when a mere two weeks later – after only being on the market for one full day – we accepted an offer on the house. so much for taking 6 months to come up with a plan for what we’d do when we sold the house!

i should probably mention that diane, our sister-in-law with whom we co-own the house, deserves much of the credit ( or blame, depending on how you’re looking at it 🙂 ) for selling the house so quickly. she’s recently received her real estate license and has quickly proven why she’s going to be the grand rapids real estate baroness.

and yes, we really did paint our house orange, which is much better than the haunted house gray it was painted when we moved in.

while it’s mostly true that we sold the house to give us flexibility in the future . it’s a little disingenuous to imply that our decision was solely based on wanting the flexibility to take a new job in walla walla.

any parent will tell you that having a child changes your life in ways that you can’t fully appreciate before you have the child; you can imagine how children might affect your life, but until it happens, i’d argue that you can’t really appreciate how having a child changes everything. and i think this is all the more true when you spend 96 days in the neonatal intensive care unit. the experience has certainly changed kris and i in ways that we don’t even fully comprehend yet. so, who knows, maybe instead of taking that job in walla walla ( or wherever ), we’ll buy an airstream and travel the country visiting postcard project destinations. or who knows what. i’m sure while we take time to figure out what we do next, we’ll continue to live in interesting times.

stay tuned.

[ oh and in case you didn’t figure it out, in the picture odin is carefully inspecting the packet of documents that we needed to sign to transfer ownership of the house to the buyer. ]