February - To Do

I can't believe it's almost February.  January went by so fast!!

Here's what's going on in February.

Key Dates
February 13th - Brother-in-law's birthday
February 14th - Valentine's Day

Give Banshee her meds.  - here's hoping we go 2 for 2 so far this year.
Send birthday card to Brother-in-law.
Valentine's Day.

       - Do something crafty or bake something fun with Madeleine.
       - Get Valentines & candy for Madeleine's daycare group.
       - Date night with Bill.
Finish any outstanding House Fix-its.
Find a plumber - our upstairs bathroom is leaking through to the room beneath - ugh!
Continue the Big Purge.
Put the house up for sale!!

That's right...we are moving!!  Where to...I have no idea!!

Basically, we know we don't want to stay in our current house.  It's actually big enough for our expanding family, but I'm not fond of the public school system there.  It probably would be okay for elementary school, but I wouldn't want to send my kids to our public high school...so we'd have to go private if we stayed.  I'm not sure I want to do that either.  So, we want to move somewhere that has really awesome public schools.

Besides that, we've really gotten to the point where it doesn't make sense for us to put much more money into our house.  We won't see a return on it.  I'm not even sure if we'll see a return on what we already put in.  The house is far from how we would want it, so we'd never really be happy in it knowing we couldn't do all the upgrades we'd like.

Finally, this was our first house.  We went from a 700 square apartment to a 1700 square foot house, so it was all very new and exciting.  However, after living there for 4 years now, I realize there were things we didn't consider before we bought it.  Things that didn't even cross our mind.  Now, I have a much better idea of the type of house that will work for how we live.  Things like layout, yard size, privacy, etc.

So, hopefully we'll have it up for sale by the end of the month, and we'll see what happens.  We're actually not going to look for a new house right now either.  Bill's father, who lives in California, also owns a 2-bedroom townhouse condo near my work here in Wisconsin.  He comes up every couple months or so, and stays for about a week.  So, essentially, it is vacant probably 10 months out of the year.  After the house sells we're going to camp out there for awhile to save money while we figure it all out.

It's a bit of a crazy plan, I know; especially with a new baby coming in a few months; but we've thought long and hard about it and are ultimately really excited about this change.  We have a lot of work still to do on the current house to get it ready though, so here's hoping for a very productive February.