Monday, August 8, 2011

A House for Sale and a Scam

For about the past year, Tony and I have thought about selling our house.  With the addition of Grace, we have simply run out of room.  We bought our house in May of 2006.  We'd been married for two years and decided we were done with renting apartments/houses and wanted a place of our own.  The problem was that we were moving back to Louisville from a brief stint in Northern KY and wanted to find a house fast...and we did.  Within 2 weeks of Tony's job transfer back to Louisville, we were moving into our new (to us) home. 

Our house has been a good little house, however, with only 1200 sq. ft., we are busting at the seams!  Hard to believe that 5 years ago, we bought this house knowing that we would only be here about 5 years.  Since then, we have added 2 beautiful little girls to our family.  We have a lot of memories in our house, and it will be bittersweet when we finally move away....here she is:

My parents bought a house and put their house up for sale, so that is how I found our realtor.  Tony and I have been all-talk about putting the house up for sale, but dragging our feet to get everything completed.  So I made an appointment for her to come to our house and talk to us about putting it up for sale...2 weeks later, we had a sign in our yard.  Our house has never looked so good! We did some serious de-cluttering and most of our stuff is at my parent's new house...thanks Mom and Dad!  Projects that were supposed to be completed 4-5 years ago finally were completed!  It is so weird to see a for sale sign in our yard...not to mention a little vulnerable to have people all over the internet looking at the inside of our house with all our things!!

The day after we put the house up for sale we had some buyers go through, but of course they wanted more square footage, then 2 days later, we had an open house with about 5 different sets of people go through, but no luck yet.  Keep your fingers crossed that this process doesn't last too long!

As the title of this blog suggests, we have also dealt with a scam this past week.  About a week ago I was outside with the girls and a couple pulled up in front of the house and asked if our house was still for rent, I told them no, that we aren't renting...we are selling.  It seemed a little odd, but I didn't think much else about it.  A couple days later we went to the lake for most of the week...This past Thursday, our neighbor called us (who we are really good friends with) and said some guy came to his house and was asking questions about our house being for rent.  Our neighbor continued to say that this guy had found our house for rent on hotpads.com, and had been emailing an "Anthony Waterson" back and forth about renting it out.  He went on to add that this Anthony Waterson was moving to the Sahara Dessert for several years and needed someone to keep up with the house while he was out of the country and that he wanted a deposit of $800 and $800 every month for rent, and that this Anthony Waterson was pushing for the money up front.  Of course our neighbor told this guy that this wasn't true at all...and called us right away.

Sure enough, we went on hotpads, and there was our house...for rent?!  Someone had found Tony's name and matched it to our house and put it for rent on hotpads, trying to scam people out of money.  It was really creepy and uneasy knowing that someone had taken his name and information and used it to try and make a profit.  Tony reported our house as a scam and it was quickly taken off the website thankfully (it's still on there for sale).  My mom had told me a story about this happening to one of her friends a while ago...my realtor said that she had heard of it as well. If you are putting your house up for sale, be careful!!

So hopefully the renters will die out and the right person will come along and fall in love with our house like we did 5 years ago...

Keep your fingers crossed!

On another note, I will be returning to work in a few days...which means teaching full-time, taking classes full-time, raising my family, AND selling a house (hopefully buying one soon too)...I will try my best to update the blog every so often, but I can't make any promises!!

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Life at the Lake

My parents own a little house at Rough River Lake.  From April-September most of our weekends are spent there.  It's our favorite place to go.  With no cell phone connection, and no internet, you are forced to disconnect from the rest of the world.  Our days are spent playing outside, swimming, boating, fishing, laying out, eating, and sleeping.  It's like a mini-vacation everytime we go.  Whenenver we are packing up to go home, Hannah says "I want to stay at the lake forever and ever".  Well said Hannah....well said!
Here are some recent pictures that highlight our life at the lake...
View of the Lake House

Captain Papaw driving the new boat

Hannah loves boat rides!!

Time for a swim...

Convincing Gracie she loves the lake (this was her first time in this summer...she actually likes it now)

Our little fisher-girl

Tony and GG with Hannah's big catch

Petting a fish

Tony's catch

Hannah's forever place

Thank you humidity for Gracie's beautiful curls :)