Moved into the New House, Out of Collinsville House

As I mentioned before, we moved into the new house over Memorial Day weekend. We gave the house in Illinois away yesterday. We went with the company buy-out even though we had an offer for the buy-out price. Regardless, the price was so low we lost a ton of money on the house. It is a good time to buy a house but a terrible time to sell one. We took the company buy-out rather than the offer because the buyers had a contingency in the contract that if their house did not sell, they could break the contract. Therefore, we would have to wait until closing to get cashed out on the house. With the extra expense of holding on to the house that long, there was not any incentive to not just take the buy-out and be done with the house now. We did not want to accept all the risk associated with waiting and there was not a financial incentive to do so and there are a ton of negatives to holding on to the house longer, so as of yesterday we went from 3 houses down to 2. At the end of June we will no longer have to pay rent on the other house so we will be back to a single house family. I can hardly wait!

Since we got rid of the house in Illinois, we also got rid of our Illinois cell phones today. So if anyone still has those 618 numbers, they no longer work for us. We have new cell phone numbers but I do not want to post them here so if you would like our new cell phone numbers, please send us an e-mail and we will give you our new numbers. Our home phone number is the same as it was in the rental house because we were able to move it. If you have our home number, it is still valid. If you want our new address, please send us an e-mail and we will send that to you as well.

Below are a few of pictures of our new house.

This is the front of the house. It has a tandem 3-car garage which means the garage on the right is deep enough to park two cars. With that much space we might eventually be able to get one car in the garage once I get it organized and everything on shelves.

This is a picture of the entryway. On the left is a formal dining room but we do not do formal dining so it is our piano room. On the right is the formal living room which we have turned into a library. No pictures of the library yet because it is now full of all the pictures we need to hang on the walls.

This is the formal dining room which is really our piano room. We keep the china cabinet there but we have found it best at this stage in our lives to not let the kids eat on carpet. We have found formal dining rooms to be a waste of space so we use it as our piano room.

Once we get the house more put together I may post some additional pictures. For now it pretty much looks like a new house with boxes all around and no pictures on the walls. They are all stacked in the library.

Memorial Day Weekend - Gas Prices & Moving

For Memorial Day Weekend the price of gasoline and diesel shot-up as is typical when the high driving season begins. For those not familiar with the basic economic forces of supply and demand, when demand goes up (i.e. people drive more) and the supply stays the same, the price will go up. Given these high gas prices and the typical hysteria directed at the oil companies, I thought these cartoons were good.


The good news is we did not do much driving this weekend so the high gas prices did not have a huge effect on us. Instead, we moved into our new house this weekend. Yeah! Actually, we have been working on moving over the last month. We closed on the house on April 15th and the items from our house in Illinois were delivered on April 16th. Since we have the lease on the rental house until the end of June, we started the moving process and have been slowly moving stuff from the rental house to the new house. We got to the point where showing the rental house (we have been showing it since March with the hope that it would rent and we could break the lease early and get out of June’s rent, but that did not happen) was a huge pain in the rear-end. So, we decided to take advantage of the long weekend and move even though the kids are not out of school yet. Lori will have to be the bus driver for the next two weeks but she felt that doing that is far easier than dealing with showing the rental house.

In addition to the challenges of moving and two houses in Houston, we still have our house in Illinois. We should be rid of it within the next 7 days (hopefully by the end of the week???) and that will be a huge financial and worry burden lifted. Then we will get rid of the rental house at the end of June and we will be down to one house again. Yeah! We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.


Since we have been working on moving for over a month the final weekend was not as traumatic. I have not been blogging because I have been very busy moving and setting-up the new house. In addition, we have not been doing anything interesting to blog about. Taking pictures of us moving boxes is not very interesting.