Cannon Beach is our favorite Oregon beach town, it is small and not so touristy, lots of quaint little shops and restaurants downtown.  We had a nice hotel right on the beach.  I read an entire book in 2 days, we played in the water (very chilly), walked in the sand, had beach campfires roasting hotdogs and mallows.  All in all, exactly what we needed with all the housing stress lately.

And I caught some great sunsets those 2 nights!

We’ve been running errands, packing, painting, cleaning and organizing every day after work.  I’m happy to say that Scott’s terribly dark office is now back to white.  All wall holes have been patched.  I’ve scrubbed 2 of the 4 bedrooms and I spent a little less than 2 hours scrubbing the kitchen last night.  I pulled weeds for about an hour yesterday, have a bit more to go in the front.  We have been piling misc stuff from around the house in the living room and once we have that packed then all that is left is the things we have to do last minute (our offices, clothes, bathroom stuff).

I hired movers yesterday to come Tuesday morning.  I also hired carpet cleaners for Tuesday afternoon (we are determined to get our entire security deposit back).  We have our final walk through of the house scheduled for 2pm tomorrow, immediately followed by our closing on the house.

You know us, we’re super organized and planful so we are working through a nice excel spreadsheet of to-do items to get the house ready to leave and to get our address changed everywhere and all utilities started and stopped.

It’s been a crazy week but it will have a great ending.  We leave Saturday morning to spend 2.5 days relaxed in Cannon Beach before the move.  We’ll see you all on the flip side (which will be over the river and through the woods to our new home in Washington!!).

We had some wine and beer tastings, which resulting in me bringing an amazing bottle of pear wine home with me which did not last the day.  We had giant fresh yummy cookies at one of the fruit stands.  I found that I think I have an allergy to lavender – once we stopped at a lavender farm I thought I was going to die.  We saw amazing views of 2 giant mountains and miles of fruit trees.

We started our day at Double Mountain brewery so Scott could have some tasty fresh beer and we could have the pizza that we have grown to adore so much over the last couple years.  All in all, it was a perfect day.

Glorious Mt Hood

Miles and miles of white flowered fruit trees below

At a pick your own flower farm - can't wait to go back when it's roses!!

The most amazingly beautiful magnolia tree

Pretty pink trees and a giant mountain

They don't look pretty, but a ton of lavender smells amazing...until your allergies disagree

We are unfortunately not going to Astoria this weekend for their wine and seafood fest.  We are planning on moving in about 2 weeks and since we are spending our last weekend in this house at the coast, we felt we needed to stay here to finish packing, start painting and cleaning our place.

We had tons of great news on the housing front this week.  Monday our loan was approved through underwriting!  Hugh sigh of relief there.  Then Thursday our appraisal came back above our loan amount so another giant sigh of relief.  We have the inspection on Tuesday where we will learn about our house and walk thru to make sure everything is up to our expectations.  Our blinds/shades should be installed the first full week in May and then we’re looking to move to our new house on the 15th!  Whew!

2 weekends ago we drove up to Forest Park to check out Pittock Mansion.  Giant house built in the earlier 1900′s at the top of the forest with the most amazing views of the entire Portland area and 2 giant snow capped mountains.  It was beautiful!!

After that we drove across the river to a little park overlooking the river and had a little time to relax and enjoy the warm and sunny day.

This past weekend we had house business to attend to.  After choosing flooring and window treatments we drove East from our soon-to-be-new-home to check out the WA side of the Columbia River.  The views were literally breathtaking.

We stopped at Skamania Lodge, a very pricy hotel along the river on the WA side to have Sunday brunch.  This place was recommended to us from our pest control guy and I have to say…some of the best food ever.  Very pricy brunch ($31 a person) but it was amazing food including crab legs, shrimp, salmon and any breakfast food you could think of plus BOTTOMLESS MIMOSAS!  And of course this amazing view.

After stuffing ourselves we hopped over the river via the Bridge of the Gods and headed back towards Portland.  We wanted to take the historic Oregon highway which goes past all of the waterfalls through Multnomah.  Half of this road we’ve seen numerous times but we saw miles of this road we hadn’t previously.  We got to see a new waterfall and the Vista House, a very cool structure perched atop the mountains with more gorgeous river views.

All in all, a perfect day of gallivanting.  We are SO excited for this coming weekend when we’ll be heading back East to Hood River for some awesome Double Mountain pizza and beer and then taking the Fruit Loop tour which has a ton of wineries and fruit farms.  It is their annual bloom fest so we should get to see tons of beautiful flowering trees and of course, the majestic snow covered Mt Hood.  It’s supposed to be sunny, it’s supposed to be warm and it’s going to be amazing!

Until next week!

We first headed downtown along the riverfront to see the cherry blossoms start to bloom.  Great little park with tons of people milling about and beautiful trees!

After wandering in Chinatown for a bit we got back in the car and drove a few miles to Forest Park.  Forest Park is amazing, high up on a hill, giant forest.  Amazing.  Our destination this time was to find the “Witches Castle”.  I had seen photos online of this cool old stone building covered in moss in the middle of nowhere and figured it was a great photo opportunity.  After hiking what seems like days (and was actually only 1 mile but a solid uphill mile though) we finally found it.  The hike was beautiful.  You really feel like you are in the middle of nowhere among all the trees and hills and the trails followed a great little stream the entire way and the rushing sound of water was so calming.

It was so good to get out of the house and explore again.  I very much missing our weekly excursions around Oregon.  So once we got home we started looking at the festivals coming up this spring.  And I started looking for other nature places I want to explore.  We have a long list now of things to do!  Now we just need the weather to cooperate as it is still cold and rainy here.

In two weeks we are SO excited to head out to the Mt Hood area for their annual bloom fest.  We’ll get to see tons of blossoming trees, eat good food, drink good beer/wine and see the glorious mountain.  Very very excited and I’m sure I’ll come back with a few hundred photos (last weekend I took about 100 and I’m starting to shoot in RAW so my file sizes are insane now).

After the bloom fest we are hoping to head back to Astoria for their Crab and Wine festival.  Fresh seafood, good wine plus the home to The Goonies?  Ummmm….I’m there! We really love Astoria so I’ll be happy to go back.

The calendar is filling up fast so I will do my best to start posting more to give you recaps and photos from our explorations!

So we drove to another lot we liked, that the first builder was still evaluating for costs and feasibility (at this point they said it would be a day or two and it had been a week and we were still waiting for the estimates).  This one we loved the view, but because it was right against the giant power lines, our agent though the resale value would suffer greatly.

Checked out some other lots….builder isn’t willing to sell them and we don’t like the builder that owns them.  Completely dejected and getting pretty wet (it is the rainy season after all and we’ve been trudging through muddy lots for 2 hours) I give our agent a copy of an existing house I liked.  Maybe at this point we need to say screw it and settle for an ok house.  It happened that it was about a half mile away!

So we went over to the house and found that there were about 6 for sale on the same street.  As luck would have it, our agent also had to code to get the key out of each lockbox and we could look inside.  Score!!  First house was amazing.  3 story house on a hill with a view of the Columbia river and Mt Hood from the back.  Unfinished basement.  Not bad.  Back down the hill we saw the most amazing house….3 story, finished basement and it backs up to a forest.  Like a forest forest.  Protected green space with acres of fir trees covered in moss and what’s that?  Oh, that’s the sound of a nice sized creek running about 50 feet form the back yard.  Heaven.  It was perfect!  We looked at a couple more but we still went back to the blue house.

We left excited and anxious and worried as we were expecting to build and have 4 months to get things together and this would move things up to 30 days.  Eek!  We spent Sunday talking plans for our new blue house and then the call came in….the builder had accepted an offer the day before.  Nooooo!!!  But good news!  They can build the same exact house 5 doors down!  WAHOO!!!

So now we get the best of both worlds.  We get the perfect blue house that we loved, but we get the extra time we need to save money and pack all our crap.  We get to pick out all our finishes and colors.  We get to add upgrades that we really want that are difficult to put in a finished home (built in surround sound, CAT5 outlets, etc).  And we get the same amazing back yard that is nothing but forest and running creek sounds and beauty.

Monday we signed the final contract and wrote a large earnest money check.  Unless something terrible happens with our financing half way through (fingers crossed), we will be the proud owner of a 3,200 sq ft house with 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths and 2 extra areas in the finished basement.  Fully landscaped front and backyard with sprinklers and fencing.  We are paying $10k less than we were expecting for a 2,500 sq ft home with our other builder so more house for less.  We get $10k to spend on additional upgrades and a fridge, washer and dryer.  And we get our closing costs paid for.

Our weekend did not go as we had planned but it had a very happy ending.  We are past phase one which was very painful.  We have a long way to go.  There is still much to do and much that could go wrong I suppose.  But, the plan is to have our new finished home in June, just 3 short months from now.  And hopefully this move, which will be the 9th time in 12 years, will be our last.

<insert huge sigh of relief and a giant smile>

-Scott

Site maintenance guy (and hubby)

<Goes to Pintrest account created months ago and never touched> I’ll create a board about Hunger Games stuff to promote our 3 Etsy shops.  Better add some other Hunger Games items that aren’t mine.  Hmmmm, that was kinda fun.  Ok, let’s add a Harry Potter board.  Add our stuff.  Add other stuff.

Oooo, people are repinning my Hunger Games magnets!  Nice!  Let’s make a LOTR board.  Add our stuff.  Add other stuff.  More repins!  Wahoo!

I can’t get photography views, I’ll create an Oregon board of photographs.  OMG!  I found some new places I want to check out to take my own photos!  Write that down.

What is the point of this site?  Like Facebook for links?  Oooo, fun Big Bang Theory stuff, gotta follow that person’s board.  Oh, that Winnie the Pooh photo is funny, repin to my board.  Oooo, I like that dress!

2 hours later.  Ok.  I get it.  It’s crack.  I want more for no good reason.  Guess I need to add Pintrest to my daily rotation of to-dos.

The start of my new insanity.

This weekend was no exception on the busy front.  We got some bad news late Friday on the plots of land we were looking to build on, they are way too expensive to build on.  So back to square one.  We spent 7 hours in the car Saturday looking at additional builders, checking out new lots, looking at lots we had already seen and going to an open house for an existing home.  It was exhausting.  We came home with MUCH more information than we knew what to do with.  We had to make some cut throat decisions to weed out some of our choices and came up with just a couple.

On Sunday we got back in the car and back across the river to look at some additional lots.  We found one we really like!  Smaller than the one we were set on, but larger than the builder could offer us in their community.  Up on a hill.  View of Mt Hood and the gorgeous Columbia River from the lot.  Yay!

We came back and sent the lot info over to the builder to get an estimate, fingers crossed it comes back much lower.

This morning I got a note from our agent who said that the competitor builder we were checking out has a community right near the lot we were looking at.  Similar floor plans and upgrades for less money and larger lots.  We’re waiting on some more info on sizes and times we can check them out.  Looks like they might be a viable option as well, we can get more house for less money which is ultimately the best option right?

After all the house stuff yesterday we had some business errands to run and we got to escape for about an hour and go for a walk in the park near our house.  It was beautiful, sunny and warm yesterday (quite the contrast from the nasty windy cold rain we have right now) so it was great to get out and go for a walk.  And apparently everyone else had the same idea, the place was packed!  I took a few photos of all the beautiful moss in the forest.  This is one of the best features of Oregon, greeeeeeeeeen things.

We also had a ton of business work to do last night.  We had about 20 orders of art and magnets to package for shipment today and we had a new magnet set to prep.  Of course first I had to re-build my light box, which was a pain in the butt.  But, we got new photos taken and I got the listing up this morning before work.

Behold, Hunger Games!

We have 3 additional sets in various stages of release so hopefully I can get all 3 of them ready and up by the end of the week.

Here’s to the start of another crazy week!  And we’ll try to take at least a little time out to have some “fun”.

Everything was put on hold while I was trying to work, run all 3 Etsy shops and be at the hospital each day.  But life is finally starting to get back to normal.  The businesses are all caught up.  Our new machine cutter is set up and working wonderfully (after my father helped us figure out the machine issues and my husband fixed our print templates).  I’ve started doing some bulk cutting and I can’t tell you how amazing it is to be back to a point of having stock again.  I just pull a completely packaged set and pop in a bubble mailer, ta-da!  And creating a set now takes about 5 minutes start to finish versus the 30-40 minutes it took before.  Mucho mucho happiness there.

Scott has been working on some new art that is selling well.  His doctor who piece has been getting a ton of attention the past 24 hours as it was featured on an official SyFy blog, which resulted in many reblogs and today was up on icanhascheezburger.  It caused him to completely sell out of his stock that we just received Saturday and so another order of prints were placed last night.  Woohoo!!

The house build is back on.  We debated pushing it off until the end of the year with the new medical debt that will be coming our way, but there are rumbles of new FHA rules that are looking to come out this summer that could leave us on the unapproved side of things.  After much number crunching and discussing with our lender, we have decided we can still afford to move forward.  We should be receiving some more accurate lot estimates this week, we have an appointment to go over some standard versus upgrade features on Saturday to help give us a better idea of the final house price for what we want and we’ll probably be ready to sign some official documents in the next couple weeks.  Very exciting!

I also made an appointment with a CPA to have our taxes done late next week.  Something I’m very much dreading.  I’ve never paid someone to do my taxes, why spend the money when you can do it yourself?!  But 2011 brought with it a change in state (which is always a pain) plus a significantly higher amount of profit from our Etsy businesses along with Scott becoming an independent contractor with 1099 income.  All of that together is a bit much for me to figure out and not get audited.  I’m hoping a professional will be able to help us not pay out too much (I know we’re going to owe a lot) and then I’m hoping I’ll be able to mimic for future years so I don’t have to continue to pay out the ass for a CPA.  Fingers crossed it is not too sad of an outcome.

So that’s life in the Smith house lately.  Scott is busting his ass on art with huge payoffs from his labor.  I’m working to build up our magnet inventory and I’m ready to create some new sets to hopefully bring in a ton of hits on relevant keywords.  We’re busy busy like always but I’m happy to report it’s a good kind of busy and not the stressful-I-can’t-handle-anymore kind of busy that it has been the past couple weeks.

And…it’s snowing here in Portland today.  Not enough to stick, but lots of flakes falling on and off this morning.  Where the hell is spring!?