House Hunting

I have noticed for many people, especially the ones my age, Memorial Day is simply a free day off of work. Maybe a day to throw a BBQ, or a long weekend to go camping, but rarely do I hear them remembering people they have lost. I would be lying if I said my family never camped or had BBQ's over Memorial Day weekends too, we've enjoyed the benefits of holiday weekends many times. However we also have a long standing tradition of putting flowers on the graves of those we have lost. Of course this includes my own grandparents now, but even before that we always made a point of visiting my parents grandparents, my mother's twin sisters, and an assortment of their Aunts, Uncles, cousins and friends. This past Monday was Memorial Day. Since I had the day off of work, I decided to join my parents in putting flowers on the graves again this year. Bob was feeling under the weather, and my sisters had work or other plans, so it ended up being just me, my mom and dad. This year my mother had an extra project up her sleeve. She has recently been putting together some "Ancestry Books" that include our genealogy, as well as pictures and stories she has gathered about each of our ancestors. In these books she wanted to include a picture and location of each of their gravestones for anyone who wanted to visit in the future. The problem was, we had never been to many of these graves ourselves. My mom did her research online about which ancestors were buried at which graveyards, and which plots if it was available, and then we began our search. It took all day long, but we were surprisingly able to find most of them! As a thanks for helping them find all the graves, my parents took me to dinner at Taco Bell and later ice cream at Granny's up in Heber.

Grandma and Grandpa Graham's grave

Grandma and Grandpa Bell's grave

Then it was down to business for Bob and I. On Tuesday Bob and I sat down with a financial advisor. We discussed our assets, and investments, how to make a realistic budget, how to properly save for emergencies and retirement and most importantly what we should be looking for in a home from the financial standpoint. We learned a lot in that meeting so we set up a second meeting to go over our pre-qualification documents next week.

Wednesday was our pre-qualification interview with Jason Quinney of US Bank. It was a little nerve-wracking. We had been preparing for this moment for nearly 2 years, but I felt like they might still find a reason to deny us... Finally Jason came back to give us the news. We were APPROVED! I was so relieved to hear that! Bob and I went straight to Firehouse Subs for a celebratory lunch. Before we even made it inside, Jen was calling us to congratulate us. She sent us a house-hunting survey to discuss all our likes and dislikes and let us know that Danyl would be the associate doing most of the house shopping with us.

By Friday we were out looking at houses. We looked at 3 houses that morning but none of them felt like the right one. This morning we hit the streets again, and again none of the houses felt right. It's still early in the search process but I'm already feeling discouraged. It seems like the houses I looked at online last fall were better than the options we have now. The good ones that do come on the market now are scooped up faster than we can make appointments to look at them! The houses we do get to see just don't fit what I envisioned for our home. Maybe I'm being too picky as well, but we are about to invest a lot of time and money into this thing, I just want it to be the right one! We are going back out tomorrow, so fingers crossed we find the one!

House shopping didn't completely dominate our weekend this week! On Saturday we had more movie tickets from work, this time to see Maleficent. The movie was not as good as I thought it was going to be, and I hate to say I was disappointed in it but hey, at least it was free! After the movie we met up with our friends Shane and Channing at Red Robin to do some catching up!

This weekend, some idiot also broke into our Suzuki! Luckily there was nothing valuable in the car so nothing was missing but they sure made a mess!