We've been looking at getting out of the place we're living in now for quite some time now. The most ideal situation would have been to buy a single-family house in a quiet neighborhood a little drive out of town. That hasn't happened mostly due to a lack of appropriate offerings in our price range.
As previously mentioned here, the process to get out got sped up a little bit at the first of the year when Holly Station Townhomes changed management companies and cleaned house (ha!) of the previous office staff and brought in a group of people that nobody likes.
After the spring's hose washing fiasco, I was ready to go. That's not to say I was resisting the thought previous to that, it just wasn't a 'must do' at the time.
We looked at a few places and we were pretty wide open regarding what we'd consider: she wanted multiple bathrooms, I wanted a garage. Some places looked real good but we ran into a problem at a lot of them: they wouldn't allow dogs. There's no way no how we'd give up the kids so those were no-gos.
We found a place after a while and I think it's going to work out well. It's only a couple miles from the current place but a world away neighborhood-wise. There are no roaming packs of teenagers, no yahoos driving too fast through the parking areas, and few yahoos driving in the area in the first place since the house is on a dead-end street.
It's nice and quiet, with a shaded backyard that we'll fence in so the puppies have a place to run around. The garage already has a yellow car in it as well as all the car care products, which is ironic since they'll be needed a lot less frequently as the car sleeps under cover regardess of the weather.
That the car care products are there while precious little else is should be a sign of where the priorities lie as far as the whole moving process. We have the luxury of time, not having to vacate Holly Station until the end of July. What this means is that we'll nickel and dime the little stuff a little every day and then suddenly we'll realize Holy Toledo we only have a week and we've got all this stuff to move and where did we get all this stuff anyway in the first place?
We're taking baby steps for now, taking a Santa Fe-full of stuff at a time, once or twice a day, so when it comes time to do the big stuff, there won't be that much little stuff in the way. So far the plan seems to be working; we'll report back to declare success or failure a little down the road.