Month: May 2012

Retro Acres is Up for Grabs

brookeshelf4 Comments

You’re looking for new digs on Salt Lake’s East bench, right?  Don’t worry, we’re outside of the neighbor-vs.-neighbor would-be historic district, which I simply call the “Disputed Zone.”  So you can tear the whole thing down and build your mini-mansion in style!

(*sob*)

Retro Acres is officially for sale.  Future buyer, I hope you appreciate the levels of deep cleaning I had to do for the open house we had a week and a half ago.

Let’s just say that I’m not the most dedicated housekeeper.

Let’s just say that my decorating style could charitably be described as “casual.”

Let’s just say that since the six-week deep clean-a-thon, the first thing most people say when entering the house is “Whoa.”

And I somehow didn’t take pictures of my own perfectly clean bedroom and master bathroom?!?

Jeffrey didn’t think it was right that all the house-for-sale pictures I took had no people, so he sneaked the camera away, and did some sample shots with Eleanor as a model.

Yeah, the one on the bathroom shows off the timeless “paper on the floor” school of interior design.

I’m really, really going to miss this house.  Setting aside the 50+ decades of Grandma memories (she lived on her own in the house until she was 99) and the fact that this is where Brian officially proposed marriage to me, this is what’s incredible about this house:

3300 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 2 3/4 bath

A lot that catches the curve of the street, so we have an enormous backyard and front yard — big enough for multiple families to pitch tents for backyard campouts.

Three living rooms.  We’ve never had an official purpose for the one in the basement.  I call it the Place Where Random Furniture Goes to Die.

But what’s really killer is the location.

Walking distance to the elementary school, the preschool, the library (the LIBRARY!), the grocery store, the park, and a funky collection of cute restaurants, gift boutiques, etc.

5-minute drive away from the zoo, This is the Place Heritage Park, Red Butte Gardens, the art-house movie theater, the best gelato place in town, the Natural History Museum of Utah . . . and BRIAN’S JOB.  He could WALK to work whenever the need arose.

Don’t blink. You will NEVER see the boys’ room look this clean again.

10-minute drive away from the University of Utah (which included Tanner Dance, where Eleanor and William took classes), the Utah Museum of Art, various attending university-related amenities, and The King’s English (the only decent indie bookstore in town).

By luck, circumstance, and the seemingly boundless generosity of my in-laws, we managed to land ourselves in an incredible house in one of the most coveted neighborhoods in Salt Lake.  It’s been really, really hard to give this up.  I’m getting mopey just writing this post; in fact, it’s the reason I’ve been avoiding blogging for the past several weeks.  This is healthy, writing about something you hate, right?

When I found out that Brian’s job offer at the University of Utah fell through (oh, yes.  They named a salary figure.  We thought it was a done deal) I spent multiple occasions sobbing for 2+ hours.  Like, wailing-style sobbing.  Looking for a new house wound me up so tight that I developed insomnia . . . which lead to more wailing.

That was all back in March, and life goes on.  Brian and I spend time making lists of What We Won’t Miss About Utah, and that helps.  You know what?  It’s going to be okay.  Losing Retro Acres is tough.

But I’m tougher.

The News That Isn’t News: Seattle

brookeshelf9 Comments

Just in case you’re one of the few people who haven’t heard the news straight from myself (or in caterwauling updates on Facebook): we are moving to Seattle this summer.

I’ve been reluctant to blog about it, mainly because writing it gives it something of a permanent status that I wasn’t ready to admit to.  But I’m over that now.  Mainly because we’ve found a place to live.  The official closing is tomorrow, so I guess there’s no more denying our future.

May I introduce you to Shoreline House?

Please refrain from pointing out the oddity of purchasing a New England Colonial-style house in the Pacific Northwest.  The point is: I have totally fallen in love with this place, and criticizing it just gets my dander up.

And if there’s anything you don’t want to hear about going up, it’s a dander.

(Possibly also mortgage rates.)

We googled the sellers as soon as we found out who they were: why were they selling?  Turns out the husband is a Presbyterian minister who got transferred to a church in California.  He and his wife also had four kids, which explains why the house is so kid-friendly: hooks and shelves in all the closets, hooks on a mudroom nook in the kitchen (I guess hooks are at a premium when 60% of your family can’t operate a clotheshanger), a giant playfort and tree swings in the backyard, and best of all: eight bedrooms, four bathrooms.

Yeah, eight.  The house was listed at six bedrooms, but the sellers were worried that eight would scare buyers away.  One of the bedrooms has been converted into an office (with a set of double French doors instead of a regular door), so I guess it’s really seven bedrooms.  But still!  SEVEN!

The funny thing is that I was so exhausted when I first toured the house (owing to stress-induced insomnia, etc.) that I didn’t even see the pink and purple rooms.  I left the house thinking that there were only six bedrooms.  It was only through comparing my snapshots with the ones on the realty website that we realized there were more.

Each of our kids can have their own room, and there will still be two left over for play, crafts, and best of all, guests.

There’s actually one more bedroom like the one shown just above, but I don’t have a picture of it.  The image on the real estate site shows it with a giant stuffed toy moose on a bed, and William keeps talking about how he wants to play with it when he arrives.  We’ve given him a smaller toy moose to make up for it.

William also says he still wants to share a room with Jeffrey, and Brian and I are all about encouraging that impulse (if there’s anyone who could benefit from the socializing effects of a roommate, it’s Jeffrey) so there may be even more space to play around with.

Of course, there are downsides to this house.  It isn’t in the city (we were priced out of Seattle proper), it has a very long private drive that we share with three other homes (kind of a hike to the mailbox) and there’s some weirdness going on with the heating system (only half of the upstairs rooms get heat, so we’ll have to fix that).

The addition of walk in closets lead to the creation of this odd little nook of a room in the master bedroom:

(I do admire the seller’s choice in paint color.)

(How will fit a piano and an organ into this room?  Stay tuned . . .)

(See that?  Gas range!  Gas range!)

But I am well pleased with what we’ve found.  Best of all: there’s room for guests.  SO: plan your cheap vacation to Seattle now!  We’re only a 20 minute drive from downtown, and a 5-minute drive from the beach.

You know you wanna visit.