The Move! Yaraschefski's Migrate to Zionsville :)
As many of you know, we had been thinking about, planning for and researching a potential move from our sweet first home, 6919 Caribou Drive, on the northwest side of Indianapolis, for the past couple of years. Our first house was wonderful, but only had two bedrooms and a loft office. Which, when we were 24, we thought was plenty of space :)
However, after Eli was born, we really started to feel the lack of space. He had many rooms in his first few months of life: Dave and I's bathroom, the guest bathroom, and the laundry room until he finally, around 11 months, moved into the actual 2nd bedroom with Luke. We had a twin bed and crib in there at the time.
We went around and around for years about staying in the Pike/Eagle Creek area vs moving up the road to Zionsville. Should we do public school or private school? Pay more for a house and less for school or vice versa? How important is diversity to us? How important is the actual house we live in vs. the city? Convenience of location? Do we want land or to be in a neighborhood? Can we leave our awesome neighbors? Should we just wall up the office and stay in our house longer? Do we want to be closer to church?
We talked briefly about other suburbs and sides of town, but after living in this area the past seven and a half years we really felt we had built our life in this corner of the city. Our church, which has been such a blessing, and beyond that, life and marriage changing for us, Luke's school (part of the church) and our friends, life groups, places we shop, eat, etc. as well as the proximity to the city, airports, and our family, we knew our choices would be staying in the area we were in, and moving up the road to Zionsville.
After talking and praying about it for years, we really found a sense of peace with moving to Zionsville, knowing there were obvious pros and cons on both sides of the decision, we really felt led to move north.
So, once we did that, I premptively started researching (aka stalking/obsessing) the areas of town, neighborhoods, schools, areas, parks, etc. I would share all my findings with Dave - who (wisely) was not financially ready to move and thus uninterested in my stalking. The summer before we moved (2016), we stayed up late one night and made a post it note board of all the must have, must not have, and wants in our forever (or at least a long time) home.
As summer rolled into fall we decided to not look for houses, to practice contentment, and to push ourselves to start tithing with the margin we had in our old house. We knew the price we would have to spend to get what we wanted in Zionsville and really just needed more time to get there financially.
However, one fateful Thursday in November, I had a super stressful morning with the boys and, as a treat to myself, decided just to browse on realtor.com and de-stress. I love to look at older houses with a lot of character, and I was set on a neighborhood called Colony Woods so I always checked out houses in that neighborhood. However, as I was scrolling, I saw a house with the specs we wanted and a great (for Zionsville :) price. It was not a house I normally would have looked at, the outside is not really my style and it was in a neighborhood I never really thought much about. When I looked at the inside, it seemed to have all the things we were looking for, along with a lot of character and updates that we wouldn't have expected to find at that price. I sent it to Dave with the thought of hey - we need to add this neighborhood to the list if you can get a house like this for that price. What I got back was "OMG, I want to buy that house."
Whoops. I did not know what I had gotten myself into. I jokingly said "Call Dan!" which was always the phase Dave threw at me when I had some pipe dream of a house. Dan was our friend and the person we knew we would use as a realtor when the time came. It was a Thursday, and when I came home from work - Dave and I talked for several hours about the house, obsessed over the pictures, and decided that we loved it. But that was it. However, the next day when I was at work, I get a message from Dave that he had called Dan, and was in fact going to be going to see the house that night. Also, he had driven by on his lunch break and loved it. Talk about escalating quickly. Might I mention at this point that we had made a lot of necessary updates to our house in the last year with the anticipation of selling, but it was NO WHERE near list ready. So then, Saturday morning before we left for a family party in Chicago, we both went to see it.
I knew standing in the kitchen looking around that it was totally our house. After Dave had seen it the first time he had a few reservations, but we talked through all of those while we were there are both left on the same page, again, that we really liked it.
We drove up to Chicago, showed the house to all of our trusted friends and family and decided that if we were going to buy our forever house, we at least needed to see another one or two houses to make sure that we weren't rushing the decision.
We went to a great (HUGE) house up Ford Road in Zionsville that Dave loved, and two in Colony Woods that I was excited to see. The Colony Woods houses were out pretty quickly, the ceilings were low, especially in the basements where our huge sons will one day be hanging out, and they both needed a ton of updates, and were $50,000 more than our house. So, that left the big house on Ford Road. I just could not get on board - I had a weird feeling about that one. Who knows. Not rational.
So we decided Monday night to make an offer on our house. We gave them until Tuesday night and the wait was excruciating. But, they had a small counter back, and we accepted!
YAY. And then, the madness of listing a home during the holidays with two toddlers began. It took us about two weeks to declutter (aka get a storage until and move a ton of things out), drywall/paint, clean, etc. to get our house on the market.
We had NO showings at all the first week. We were terrified. Then, we had one showing with an offer (not a good offer). Then, activity picked up and we had multiple showings including Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. Yup. Excellent. We had initially listed our house as a 3 bedroom, as it had been when we bought it, but someone reported us to MIBOR, so we changed the listing to a 2 BR. After that, we still had a lot of showings, and they actually seemed more successful. We eventually accepted an offer for list price the day we closed on our new house (January 11, 2017), 6822 Woodhaven Place.
We are thrilled to be making the move to a bigger home and look so forward to making memories in a new place. If I failed to mention the hand God had in this I would be remiss. We began tithing the week before our new house was listed, putting our financial trust in God, I happened to look at it the day it hit the market, it was $50,000 or so less than we were planning on paying and (as we found out as time went on) it was such a blessing to have this home and extra room as Jim was sick and we hosted family in and out of town, Jim got to see and be involved in our move before he was very sick, we had our last holiday with everyone here in this home, and it was purchased within our actual budget, not one including some financial blessings we received later.
We are thrilled to be here and feel like we are just where we are supposed to be!
However, after Eli was born, we really started to feel the lack of space. He had many rooms in his first few months of life: Dave and I's bathroom, the guest bathroom, and the laundry room until he finally, around 11 months, moved into the actual 2nd bedroom with Luke. We had a twin bed and crib in there at the time.
We went around and around for years about staying in the Pike/Eagle Creek area vs moving up the road to Zionsville. Should we do public school or private school? Pay more for a house and less for school or vice versa? How important is diversity to us? How important is the actual house we live in vs. the city? Convenience of location? Do we want land or to be in a neighborhood? Can we leave our awesome neighbors? Should we just wall up the office and stay in our house longer? Do we want to be closer to church?
We talked briefly about other suburbs and sides of town, but after living in this area the past seven and a half years we really felt we had built our life in this corner of the city. Our church, which has been such a blessing, and beyond that, life and marriage changing for us, Luke's school (part of the church) and our friends, life groups, places we shop, eat, etc. as well as the proximity to the city, airports, and our family, we knew our choices would be staying in the area we were in, and moving up the road to Zionsville.
After talking and praying about it for years, we really found a sense of peace with moving to Zionsville, knowing there were obvious pros and cons on both sides of the decision, we really felt led to move north.
So, once we did that, I premptively started researching (aka stalking/obsessing) the areas of town, neighborhoods, schools, areas, parks, etc. I would share all my findings with Dave - who (wisely) was not financially ready to move and thus uninterested in my stalking. The summer before we moved (2016), we stayed up late one night and made a post it note board of all the must have, must not have, and wants in our forever (or at least a long time) home.
As summer rolled into fall we decided to not look for houses, to practice contentment, and to push ourselves to start tithing with the margin we had in our old house. We knew the price we would have to spend to get what we wanted in Zionsville and really just needed more time to get there financially.
However, one fateful Thursday in November, I had a super stressful morning with the boys and, as a treat to myself, decided just to browse on realtor.com and de-stress. I love to look at older houses with a lot of character, and I was set on a neighborhood called Colony Woods so I always checked out houses in that neighborhood. However, as I was scrolling, I saw a house with the specs we wanted and a great (for Zionsville :) price. It was not a house I normally would have looked at, the outside is not really my style and it was in a neighborhood I never really thought much about. When I looked at the inside, it seemed to have all the things we were looking for, along with a lot of character and updates that we wouldn't have expected to find at that price. I sent it to Dave with the thought of hey - we need to add this neighborhood to the list if you can get a house like this for that price. What I got back was "OMG, I want to buy that house."
Whoops. I did not know what I had gotten myself into. I jokingly said "Call Dan!" which was always the phase Dave threw at me when I had some pipe dream of a house. Dan was our friend and the person we knew we would use as a realtor when the time came. It was a Thursday, and when I came home from work - Dave and I talked for several hours about the house, obsessed over the pictures, and decided that we loved it. But that was it. However, the next day when I was at work, I get a message from Dave that he had called Dan, and was in fact going to be going to see the house that night. Also, he had driven by on his lunch break and loved it. Talk about escalating quickly. Might I mention at this point that we had made a lot of necessary updates to our house in the last year with the anticipation of selling, but it was NO WHERE near list ready. So then, Saturday morning before we left for a family party in Chicago, we both went to see it.
I knew standing in the kitchen looking around that it was totally our house. After Dave had seen it the first time he had a few reservations, but we talked through all of those while we were there are both left on the same page, again, that we really liked it.
We drove up to Chicago, showed the house to all of our trusted friends and family and decided that if we were going to buy our forever house, we at least needed to see another one or two houses to make sure that we weren't rushing the decision.
We went to a great (HUGE) house up Ford Road in Zionsville that Dave loved, and two in Colony Woods that I was excited to see. The Colony Woods houses were out pretty quickly, the ceilings were low, especially in the basements where our huge sons will one day be hanging out, and they both needed a ton of updates, and were $50,000 more than our house. So, that left the big house on Ford Road. I just could not get on board - I had a weird feeling about that one. Who knows. Not rational.
So we decided Monday night to make an offer on our house. We gave them until Tuesday night and the wait was excruciating. But, they had a small counter back, and we accepted!
YAY. And then, the madness of listing a home during the holidays with two toddlers began. It took us about two weeks to declutter (aka get a storage until and move a ton of things out), drywall/paint, clean, etc. to get our house on the market.
We had NO showings at all the first week. We were terrified. Then, we had one showing with an offer (not a good offer). Then, activity picked up and we had multiple showings including Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. Yup. Excellent. We had initially listed our house as a 3 bedroom, as it had been when we bought it, but someone reported us to MIBOR, so we changed the listing to a 2 BR. After that, we still had a lot of showings, and they actually seemed more successful. We eventually accepted an offer for list price the day we closed on our new house (January 11, 2017), 6822 Woodhaven Place.
We are thrilled to be making the move to a bigger home and look so forward to making memories in a new place. If I failed to mention the hand God had in this I would be remiss. We began tithing the week before our new house was listed, putting our financial trust in God, I happened to look at it the day it hit the market, it was $50,000 or so less than we were planning on paying and (as we found out as time went on) it was such a blessing to have this home and extra room as Jim was sick and we hosted family in and out of town, Jim got to see and be involved in our move before he was very sick, we had our last holiday with everyone here in this home, and it was purchased within our actual budget, not one including some financial blessings we received later.
We are thrilled to be here and feel like we are just where we are supposed to be!
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