Pleasant Day in Bellevue

The three of us spent a warm day checking out the Eastside of Seattle today (Aka Bellevue) as part of our preliminary scouting of possible places to live. Yes, as soon as our home sells, which could be in a month or in a year, we will be moving into a rental on the East side of Lake Washington. We recently found a church that we've been attending. The people are pretty cool and the message is smart (a rare combo). The next thing to consider in a move is daycare. As Rachel and I will still be working, and as we have no family within a hundred miles, well be using full time daycare for our two boys. That equals about $2500 per month, or effectively $30,000 a year. That equals the take-home salary of someone making about $40,000 (40,000 *[1-25% tax] = 30,000). I am awestruck at how people can afford this. It makes so much more sense to invest that money. And the govt doesn't give parents hardly any tax assistance for daycare as they do for small potato expenses like a mortgage payment. What does a parent do...

Please forgive my run-on sentences and typos as I'm writing from my iPhone.

On the Market

A little over two years ago, Rachel and I found a cute old Craftsman home in the tony area of Proctor, Tacoma that we could afford, knowing that much work needed to be done. Over the past couple of years, we've textured walls, painted everything, de-popcorned the ceiling, tiled, added appliances and a fireplace insert, ripped out a yard and put a new one in, installed lots of random lights and fixtures, and who knows what else... I've lost track of it all. All said and done probably over $10,000 of improvements. During this time, Rachel's company decided to move forward their move-date to Seattle 3 years from 2013 to 2010. So to make a long story short, we decided that although we put tons of hard work into our great little Craftsman, it just isn't going to be possible to commute with babies in the back seat up to Seattle and back to Tacoma every day for a total of 2.5 hours ... every day. Hence, our home is on the market (how's that for back-story)

We will be taking a loss on the property given how much in transaction fees we're paying, but if we can get close to what we're asking, then Rachel and I can start fresh in a new place closer to our two offices in Seattle without breaking the bank. We're really excited that in a few months (or more, who knows) we'll be living 30 miles north in Seattle / Bellevue.

In the meantime, check out our home listing. See the improvements we've made. I think there's even a link to the original listing from the previous owner in a previous blog post that you could compare our improvements to.

Click here ... or ... click here.

More exciting news coming your way soon!

It worked. Now I'm sad because...

If I knew how easy it was to post from my phone, I would have updated much sooner. The fact is, between working a long hard day, commuting from Seattle to Tacoma, renovating our home, and raising a baby / toddler, I have no time other than the few moments I sit in bed on my iPhone prior to lights out. This changes everything! I'm so sad that I've blogged only about 6 times in the past year. Darn you Facebook for stealing my pithiest of one liners and for synopsizing my family's life experiences into one-line status updates when they deserved so much more color, context and verbiage.

So some news of the day includes this: we're selling our home. Oh yes! It turns out the company Rachel works for is moving to Seattle 3 years sooner than they anticipated. We can't both commute to Seattle with a baby in the back seat, so were selling our beautiful home and moving closer to work. We'll post the MLS listing in the next few days. The real estate market is pretty bad, but our house is really great and really decently priced, so who knows. It could sell in one week or one year!

Testing Nifty iPhone App

As about 95% of my non-work related computer time is spent on an iPhone, and as I truly am wanting to get back into a normal blogging routine (because facebook is such a bad historical family record!), I'm testing out this nifty iPhone app to see if it acurately posts to our blog. Clearly what is lost by using this app is Microsoft Word's spell and syntax check, because that last sentence was a whopper of a run-on!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone