Home For Sale

We have decided - after much deliberation - to sell our home.  We have loved living in our 1950s-built neighborhood and we can only hope we'll find neighbors as wonderful wherever we end up as we have had here.  It has been a difficult decision for us.  I'll give some details below for those who may be interested.

Reasons to stay are as follows:

• We love our neighbors.  This truly is a uniquely kind and caring neighborhood filled with nonjudgmental people.  I love that there are families in every age group, including elderly, middle-age, lots of kids and newlyweds.
• We have spent the past 6 years making this house our home.  We've made lots of wonderful memories here.  It is hard to leave a home you love, even when you feel it's time.
• We have completely redone the kitchen (complete with all possible upgrades) and both bathrooms (they're finally done and now we're leaving!).
• We've painted every room in the house at least once.
• We overhauled the basement, complete with large closet, crown moulding, paint, carpeting and all new doors.
• We added an extra-large porch onto the front of the house so we could expand our dining room out several feet and still have a larger porch with room for rockers.  We put in super deep footings so we could extend the roof to cover the large porch.  We don't believe we'll be able to increase the price of the house by the amount it would cost to finish this process, so we'll just leave it as an extra large porch and it will be ready for the new owners, should they decide they'd like a large dining room.
• Just last summer we built raised, square-foot gardening boxes and filled them with super amazing soil. 
• We converted part of our extra-large garage into a bedroom (aka "bonus" room) for my dad.
• We love our established yard, complete with large shade trees, climbing ivy, large outdoor patio and great snowboarding and sledding hills.

Reasons to leave are as follows:

• We are outgrowing our house.  We've added a child and a grandparent to our household and the other three kids have grown a lot in the past 6 years!  And they (we) are only getting bigger!
• We need more common areas - such as a large family room, and an office/sewing area.  I want my kids to want to have their friends at our house.  To encourage this, I want a nice family room with enough room for friends, games, etc.
• Ashlie, our oldest child, is going into junior high next year.  Olivia is just one year behind her.  If we're going to make a move, I think it is best to do it before they establish hard-to-lose friendships in junior and senior high schools. 
• I have really missed sidewalks.  Our neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks and we are on the benches of the mountain here in Bountiful.  I hate that my kids (especially the younger ones) can't ride their bikes without going out into the roads and onto a hill.
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We found one home that we loved and it even had a little "cottage" that my dad could have lived in, but our offer wasn't as high as the one they accepted, so we lost it.  I found another one I fell in love with, but Rob wasn't as enthusiastic.  And so we'll keep looking.