Will and Becky

One of the reasons we considered moving to North Carolina in the first place was because of the real estate here! In some areas, at least, it is MUCH cheaper than where we lived previously in Colorado. Will and I often talked about what our dream home might look like, and we quickly realized that our dream home didn't exist in Colorado at all, at least not anywhere near we lived. After visiting North Carolina, we realized that we could definitely get a much nicer house there, AND get a bigger piece of land with trees, which I've always wanted.

This house is around 3 years old, with a 1.92 acre lot. It passed the inspection with flying colors - unlike our other homes, which were pages upon pages of scary, red highlighted "this needs to be fixed" labels and home inspectors saying things like "I mean, it's got good bones..." or "Wow, you guys are brave!!" It has been such a fun experience to buy a home and just be able to focus on enjoying it and decorating it, rather than immediately doing so many expensive, time consuming projects just to get it livable. Granted, I've barely touched the decorating and organizing that I want to do, but that's okay!

When we walked through this house the first time, it was only the 4th house I looked at, but I fell in love with it right away. It checked off every item on our list (except for a 2nd living area on the main floor, but I let that one go because of the huge bonus room upstairs). Everything was exactly what we wanted - down to the style of molding they used and the paint color used throughout the house. I'll eventually paint some rooms for fun, but for now, the gray is perfect! And the closets!! There are so many huge closets!

We looked at many other houses after this one and they simply didn't measure up. There are some incredibly gorgeous houses around here in our price range, however, the vast majority of them needed a LOT of work, and we simply did not want to do that this time.

**Quick disclaimer here. My whole house is NOT all clean and nice all over like this. Especially with a baby. These pictures were taken over the course of a month or two. One room at a time. And Photoshop may or may not have been involved in removing random items here and there. Also, these are just pictures snapped with my phone. Nothing fancy, just quick to get it documented.

One of Will's biggest pet peeves with a lot of the Denver area homes was the garage RIGHT in the front of the house. We love how the garage is on the side of this house instead! Although it takes a little more driving skill to get into the garage properly. ;)

How awesome is all of this space?? I remember so many times trying to take pictures of our old houses and struggling to not have both neighbors' houses in the picture as well. Not a problem here!

Our entryway

I've always wanted a gallery wall like this one, but I've never had the money or time to spend on it! I finally did it and it turned out exactly how I imagined.

Our dining room. This room is so. huge. I don't even know what to do with it! I need a big console table or hutch or something in here, but I haven't found one yet.

Funny story: yes, we did get rid of our old table and chairs when we moved. Also, yes, that is the same table and chairs we had before. We ended up looking for a new dining set after we moved here. I went to every furniture store I could find (which is a lot here, and I was super pregnant, so, ugh.) and found NOTHING I liked. Nothing. As in, not even close.

So I got online and found our old set we had before, on afw.com, and ended up ordering it...from Colorado, where AFM is based. It took like 6 weeks to get here, and we had to spend at least $3000 for them to even bother shipping it to us, but we needed so much furniture anyway it worked out. And it was so worth it, because this is our favorite dining set ever!

I thought it would be fun to have a little extended family wall in our dining room. So we have our family picture, Will's side, my side, and our "Tanner family" from Littleton.

A mudroom!!! I'm SO excited about this! I got so tired of trying to figure out where to put everyone's things. This mudroom is actually a laundry room. BUT we have a second laundry room upstairs, so this is officially our mudroom. I may eventually build nice cubbies in here, but honestly it is fine for now, exactly how it is. Behind the door to the left there is another whole section which will be Will's and my area. It has hooks and cubbies already.

Our "semi-formal" living room, with my beautiful baby grand!

My kitchen! I love my kitchen! It's everything I was hoping for. Now, the oven leaves a bit to be desired as it tends to burn the crap out of the bottom of things, but I'm playing with it and figuring out how to work with it. I do miss my old Wolf convection oven, but I'm most definitely not shelling out the $$$ for a new one of those! :O

Our bedroom. It's on the main floor, while the kids' rooms are all upstairs. I haven't decorated yet, but I hope to do so soon. Danielle has been sleeping upstairs for a while now but I kept the bassinet for any especially bad nights.

We finally upgraded to a king size bed when we moved here. We splurged on a really nice mattress and bed frame. It is amazing. While I do like the king size, I almost find it too big sometimes!

This is Ben's room. Originally his room was going to be where Will's office is, because this room is officially the office, with no closet. HOWEVER. After he was caught hiding frogs in his closet we decided it would be best to just give him the room with no closet. He is known for hiding things in his closet (though the frogs were a first) so I do think it's for the best, for now at least. He loves his room and his awesome loft bed, so he's happy!

Here is Danielle's little corner of the girls' room. She's sharing with Elizabeth, at least some nights (Elizabeth usually spends the night in Kaylee's room).

This is Elizabeth's bed. I wanted to go ahead and get a bunk bed that would last Danielle and Elizabeth a long time, not one they would grow out of after a couple of years, so I found this one on clearance at a furniture store here. Getting it home was another whole fun story, haha! My poor husband was out of town when I bought it and I informed him "Hey I bought this bed but we have to go pick it up on Saturday..." when he got home. Thank goodness Will is a very patient and understanding man. But it's a very nice bed. It is HUGE!! But this room is so big it can easily hold this enormous bed, the rocking chair, Danielle's whole corner, and has tons of space to spare. The bunk bed has a trundle bed in the bottom as well, so we have more than enough beds.

(Their dresser is currently in the closet.)

Here's Ben and Elizabeth's bathroom. I love that they each have their own sink.

Kaylee's room! This will be the guest room when we have people come stay with us and Kaylee will stay in the girls' room in one of the many beds.

This is the bathroom right by Kaylee's room, so for now it is her bathroom. The guest bathroom when we have guests, of course. Her room and bathroom are kind of a separate wing of the upstairs, so it's perfect for guests.

Will's office (This was Ben's original room. With the frogs)

Here is the bonus room aka family room, where we keep our big TV and all the video games and consoles. It used to have curtains on all the windows, but after Elizabeth swung on them and ripped two of them out of the walls, I just took them down altogether.

Playroom - it's connected to the family room, so it's really one giant room. The kids love having their playroom upstairs, where it's bright and cheery with lots of windows. They've always played in the basement before, and I have to admit, they play in here more than they ever did in the basement. Even Elizabeth, who never really played alone, is fine coming up here and playing with her toys for hours on end sometimes, while the kids are at school. It cracks me up because the kids are so used to the basement being the separate area where they play that they call THIS the basement sometimes.

Creek in the backyard! We have about 1 acre of woods and 1 of grass. The kids LOVE going down there to explore.

The kids built a "tee-pee" and "fire pit" down here, haha. Someday maybe we'll make this a little campsite area with a real fire pit.

The trees are SO tall!

It has taken me quite some time to get these pictures up!

For anyone that hasn't heard this whole story: We bought this house in February of 2017. Shortly after, we thought about when our 2 years would be up and we could buy a new house without tax repercussions. In short, we didn't particularly like the house. I liked it, but Will hated it, and I couldn't love a house he hated! We never completely felt at 'home' there. We also had a really bad experience with the ward there, and it soured things a little for the area in general. We were struggling with it for sure.

Around December 2018, Will started casually looking for jobs in North Carolina. We'd discussed it at length and decided we might want to try living there. I was a new manager at Target, and 3 months pregnant. We decided if we were to move, we would have to be there by March 2019, or after July 2019, so I wouldn't be super pregnant or have a brand new baby when we moved.

Will went back and forth with a company for a while, and he eventually ended up taking a job they offered, starting April 15th. I finished getting the house ready to sell, while working full time at Target and taking care of the little ones while Will went and started his new job. It was EXHAUSTING. It turned out well though, because we made a very nice gain on our house! We had three people get into a bidding war on it and it turned out in our favor more than we ever could have hoped or imagined.

We moved to NC officially on April 29th. We drove all the way across the country with 3 kids, 2 cats, and me being about 34 weeks pregnant. We were supposed to have a 3 bedroom apartment, but unfortunately it wasn't available and they gave us the 2 bedroom. It was roomy enough, but we were pretty anxious to find a house, so we started the search immediately. We looked at a bunch of houses, but we fell in love with one right away and put in an offer! Funnily enough, the people moving out were moving to CO!