Wednesday, March 7, 2018

BACK TO BLOGGING

It's time for me to get back to blogging. I've been gone a long time. It's been 580 days  since my last blog post. So much has happened in the past year and a half. Over the next few blog posts I'm going to give you a brief recap to catch you up.

The biggest news is that we have relocated to the San Antonio area. Needless to say, it has been quite an adventure. We lived in the same house for 32 years. Patrick lived in Sinton or Corpus Christi his entire life except for a couple of years during college. I lived in Corpus Christi since I was 10 years old.

This was a move that we wanted to make to position us for retirement, but it has not been painless. We are learning to live in a new city. We love San Antonio ... the history, the culture, the restaurants, and being two hours closer to almost everywhere.

The bonus is that Katy and her family live in San Antonio.  Plus, we're an hour closer to Nick's family in Houston. We're able to spend so much more time with the grandkids.

Here's how it happened so fast.

The company that Patrick works for moved into a new facility in San Antonio early last year. Since we have always hoped to retire to the San Antonio area, he mentioned to his boss that he would be interested in transferring. His boss indicated that a transfer would be a good possibility within a year or so. He suggested that we get ready to put our house on the market, but said "don't do anything yet." Fast forward to March, less than three months later. He calls and says "We're ready for you in San Antonio. Put your house on the market and move."

We called our friend, Katy Groth, and listed our house on a Sunday afternoon. She put it on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) on Monday morning. We had our first offer by noon that same day.  If you are buying or selling in the Corpus Christi area give her a call. She's awesome! They eventually withdrew their offer, because a home inspection identified a couple of problems and they weren't comfortable with that even though we were having the problems repaired. We accepted the second offer less than two weeks later with the caveat that they wanted possession immediately after closing. WHAT?!

I immediately started looking for a home in San Antonio. We were very fortunate to find a fantastic real estate professional who was a huge help. If you are looking to buy a home in the San Antonio area, Chris Martinez is your man. Over the next month, he showed me at least 24 houses. We wrote offers on three before we found the one that we bought. The housing market was crazy fast. I would find a house and call Patrick to make the two-hour drive so he could see it and we could make an offer. By the time he would drive up, before we could make an offer, it would be sold. When I found the house we bought, I made an offer without him and he drove up the next weekend to see it. He didn't think it was perfect, but he was happy with my choice.

Meanwhile, we had to move out of our house in Corpus Christi on April 10. Lucky for us, Katy and Travis have a spare bedroom that they graciously let us live in for about a month. We moved into our new home the weekend of May 5th with the assistance of our kids and their spouses. Basically we moved twice, once into storage and again from storage into the house.

Immediately after we moved in we had to do some renovation in the kitchen. More about that in a later post.

Both of the real estate professionals I mentioned in this post went above and beyond what we expected to assist with buying and selling. Katy and her husband actually removed the hurricane shutters on the bedroom windows so it would pass inspection. Christopher was very hands on in making sure all the items on our home inspection were taken care of and getting the house cleaned and ready for move in. I had no idea that Realtors were this hands on. I thought they just sold houses.

On the subject of blogging, I've decided to try to give it another go. It may not be as frequent as it once was, but I'm going to try. I miss this creative outlet and occasional chronicling of our life.