New Home!

Well, we have now lived in the new home for a month and a day, and it has been amazing! The home itself has been great, and the neighborhood has been even better.

As a little backstory, we owned the condo that we lived in out in Bluffdale. I purchased it about a year before Tess and I got married. It was 1250 ft.²- three bedrooms two bathrooms. I know a lot of the time when people first get married they end up moving into somewhere very frugal, but since I didn't get married until I was 30 and I’d been working as a software developer for five years, I at least had this nice-ish place. (And that's after wheelchair expenses) I liked to tell Tess I was glad she didn't have to live in a cave :-).

We hadn't really outgrown our condo, since we haven't started having kids yet. (For those who are curious, kids are still at least a few years out). But anytime someone used the big metal stairs to get to their condo it would be noisy, and Tess was often afraid to play the piano because she didn't know if anyone above us might be taking a nap. And I wanted at least a small yard for pets someday. We were starting to feel a little tight too, for example, we stored our Christmas tree at my parent’s because we didn’t have anywhere to put it, and Tess was storing cleaning stuff in the spare bathtub. We were feeling ready for the next step. I’d like to add here that I recognize how blessed/spoiled I am. Even when it was feeling like we were running out of space, that still means all the floors were clear so I could drive around and we didn’t have clutter in any of the main rooms. I know many people have had to live a lot more cramped than I ever have.

So back in November or something my cute mom (who loves house shopping) suggested we start looking at houses even if we weren’t super serious about moving yet, just so we’d know what we like. Tess mostly did the looking, she could basically pull up a picture of the master bathroom and the front door and maybe some hallways and rule out the house just because they wouldn't work with my chair. We did put an offer on a house in Riverton that would have worked -if we had built a ramp in the garage and knocked out part of the master bedroom closet and wall. We bid $5000 over, then they raised the house price up $10000, and then we bid $2000 over THAT offer with no conditions (and even a sappy letter about ourselves) and STILL lost to one of the other someteen bids, the housing market is crazy! Of course now I’m grateful we lost that one :D.

One night Tess was on the home listing website and found a search filter for homes specifically listed as being wheelchair accessible. There were only a few. This one was even slightly out of our preferred price range, but after looking at the pictures she went and saw it while I was at work, then told me I needed to come see it too. When I first rolled into the house through the step-free garage entrance I was like “yeah crap, this is it, we need to move now huh?” The sellers agent's husband saw us leaving and called the owners to say “these are the people who you need to sell the house to.” When I asked the previous owner why they were moving and he said “honestly? I was talking to my agent, and really we all just feel that I was holding this house for you” which is neat, he accepted our full price bid without even giving other people time to offer. He was a quirky fellow and I’ll probably have a story or two about him below, but overall I’m very grateful for him holding the home for us. The home had already been listed for 21 days at the point Tess found it, which is unheard of in the current crazy market. Also, a couple of weeks before finding the house I had gotten a small raise at work. After making a bunch of excel spreadsheets, we found that the raise perfectly covered the difference between our original house budget and the slightly higher price of this house. We are just supposed to be living here haha.

Well, that's probably enough just blabbing, time to give you a tour!

This is our home! It's in South Jordan near Sprouts.

 It sits on a 1/3 acre lot, which honestly was bigger than I was looking for in a first time home, but! The owners 2 years ago landscaped it wonderfully.

 This fence originally had 2 sections taken out so the recent owner could drive his back hoe into the yard (he didn't really take good care of the yard at all). Anyway on move in day our awesome neighbors tried to put the fence back up, but the cement was damaged. So they broke it, dug it out, and re-poured cement to fix our fence. More on this later, but the best thing about this house is actually the ward and neighbors, who are incredibly willing to help. We had so many people show up to help us move that they ran out of stuff to do, so a group of them cleared out most of the overgrown flower beds. I'm tellin' you this place is special.

  This is the view if you jump the fence in the last picture.

 And now moving forward from the last picture so you can see behind the house. In this view you can see the nectarine tree, the grape vines, and Tessa's favorite, the peach tree!

Turning right from the previous picture, we have a fire pit! And a mature cherry tree! And an apple tree! There is even a tree house in the cherry tree. Maybe we will have kids someday who will use it, but for now the back fence neighbor kids spend a lot of time up there. The last guy parked a trailer or something here so a bunch of the grass is dead, but we think we'd like to pave this circle around the fireplace in some way anyway.

 Back to the front, here is a view inside the garage. No step!!

 This is our wonderful kitchen! A lot of the houses Tess looked at had smaller kitchens than even the condo, but this one is awesome :D. Note Tess painted that back wall green to add some personality to the room.

 Here's a view from in the kitchen looking out towards the family room. We painted that brown wall too. The whole house used to be painted a sick brown-green color that neither of us liked.

 This is the hallway to the master bedroom, plenty wide for my wheelchair!

  Master bedroom, with enough space I can get to Tessa's side of the bed for morning snuggles!

 View from Tessa's side into the bathroom.

 The bathroom! This was the other major selling point of the house, the bathroom is huge! We pulled out the bathtub and shower and put in our own roll in shower.

 Our last shower was small enough that Tess had to pull my shower chair out to take her own shower, but this one is big enough that it can stay against the back wall all the time. You can see it peeking out behind the curtain just a little.

 And even after the shower we still have space to add some shelves in that corner still!

 This is our walk in closet off of the bathroom, I can fit inside!

 Down the hall from the master bedroom is this guest room. It's the closest thing to a tight space for me in the house, the entrance is a little zig zag, but I fit.

 GAME ROOM! Plus an exercise bike. I know when I brag about my washboard ribs I usually say "and I don't even work out!" but if cardio counts as working out than I'm lying, oops.

 Second bathroom, by the two other rooms.

 Family room! I can drive around the couch in circles!! Which brings up another thing I love about this home. Our condo was 1250 ft.², and apparently finding a house that same size with a yard is not a thing. Most places we looked at were 2500 ft.² but they all included a 1250 basement that I couldn't really access. While any of those homes would still be an upgrade for storage space and Tess-space, the Corby living space would have stayed the same. However, our new home is 2550 ft.² but 1650 of it is on the ground floor with a small loft area upstairs (no basement), so it's even an improvement for me! I'm so spoiled/blessed :D

 Another angle on the living room, you can see we keep the piano in the coat closet, it was a perfect fit!

 You can see me here looking up at the open space above me, it goes clear to the ceiling and has a big window in it I love. Also, funny story about the carpet in this room- the previous owners had a few pets and must have never vacuumed. On the day we got the keys to the house Tess brought some paint swatches and wanted my super-valuable masculine color opinion. I picked one that matched the corner of the grey carpet I was closest to, but then Tess grabbed my arm and pointed the swatch at a spot of carpet that had been protected by furniture. Turns out the carpet was actually brown. During the week before we moved in Tess, one of her sisters, and my mom vacuumed literally 18 times AND had professional carpet cleaners come, and we were still finding dog hair. We also had someone come clean the kitchen and bathrooms- the kitchen alone took 4 hours because there was dog hair stuck in the stove and oven.

This came out of the vacuum after Tessa's 3rd attempt, and that was after the ward helped vacuum before too. Crazy amounts of dog hair, seriously crazy.

 

Here is the garage door and the laundry room.

 If you go up the stairs you find Tessa's office space craft room. Over the left wall you can see down into the living room. Pictures really don't do the upstairs justice.

If you turn around in the office there's this bench, and this whole projector wall set up I'll probably never use.

 Supply storage room!

 Me down in the living room!

 That window if you look straight over.

Quilting space and thermostat room! One quirk we'll change eventually, the thermostats are both up here. Also I pluralize thermostats because the house has forced air cooling but radiant heat, and apparently it's hard to get a thermostat that can handle both.

 Random window hallway upstairs.

 And finally, a bedroom upstairs if we ever need it.

Random fact: this home was built in '97 in a special style where the outer walls are solid cement. They pour them flat and have something like a modern barn raising. The quirky part about that is you can't run wires in solid cement, so none of the outer walls can have electrical outlets. My wonderful dad added some outlets in the ceiling so that we could plug some lights in.

It's sad to say but our last ward wasn't a great fit for us. We made a few good friends and were enjoying inviting people over for dinners, but it never felt like home. Also it's worth repeating that I don't wan't Tess to be my caregiver, so I like to hire local volunteers and pay them a little to help get me in and out of bed and such. This to me was the biggest stress of moving- finding a new person to help with my bowel care routine usually takes me a few months, and I never know if I'm making progress until the wonderful person just appears. It's always been a good experience for me once I find them (special shout out to Georgia and Delynn!) but it's STRESSFUL leading up to it! In our old ward, only one of my regular bed transfer helpers was in our ward. Everyone else lived in neighboring wards. To be fair, our old ward was a very young ward. When they split the ward I think they said we still had 180 kids under 12, so I understand most families were a little burnt out just surviving with 4 kids under 7 at home or whatever. They were all great people, it just wasn't a great fit for me partially because people didn't have energy to spare to help or even to socialize much.

This new ward probably looked a lot like the old ward 15 years ago. But now all those young kids are teens or going on missions, and everyone has rubbed shoulders with everyone else for years. We started coming to the ward over a month before moving in so we could start getting to know people and maybe get some help set up. The Elders Quorum President called and got all the details of what I needed, and the day we moved in he gave us a completely filled schedule of ward members who had volunteered to take care of everything! Including THREE different people to help with bowel care! It was a mind blowing blessing and I'm still so incredibly grateful for everyone who comes. They've all been reliable, even finding their own substitutes when needed.

Lastly, our neighbors have even come over 6+ times to work on our broken sprinklers, especially two neighbors in our circle and one neighbor down a little ways from us. Apparently our circle has the nickname of "celestial circle" since it is so ridiculously awesome. They added a new turn off valve to our secondary water and replaced a crack in our pump and changed out some broken sprinkler heads and helped us adjust their aim and so on. And for every guy that helped there has been two more that said they'd be happy to come if I asked. Our next door neighbor even pressure washed our driveway and garage, edges our lawn, and pulls the garbage cans out to the street every week.

I'm sure everyone can relate to how hard it can be to let others serve you. We all want to be independent and don't want to bother anyone or whatever our reasons are. But just remember, people are blessed when they serve, and if no one lets people serve them, then no one gets the blessings of service. Allowing someone to serve you is a service for them. For me I have some pretty obvious and straight forward needs, but for you even if you have something like a project you've wanted to do in your yard but it'd take forever to do yourself, I'd encourage you to ask your ward for help, I'm sure the youth can take a break from Fortnite sometime.

Anyway, we love it here, thanks for reading!