Thanks for well-wishes on our (rental) house hunt! They accepted our application & terms! We just have to sign the lease. (c:

Neighborhoods in ‘burby Chicago are varied; we ran across rents from $15,000 per month to $600 per month and commutes from 10 minutes to over an hour. We saw a three bedroom place that looked like a single family on the outside, but was split into 2 units; one of which held a family of 6+, a couple cats, some birds, and some fish in its’ 3 bedrooms. One of our biggest considerations was a yard for the dog. She gets rather miserable being constrained to a leash & you can almost see the puppy depression in her eyes for not having free squirrel-chasing reign over a yard.

We finally settled on a house in the country…I have to say it’s simply perfect for us! Well, almost perfect! It’s fugly as hell on the outside (complete with bad 70’s brick), the brick hearth is outdated, there’s a urinal in the master bath (!), and a teeny-tiny tub. But for a whopping $10 more than what we were paying for our under-insulated (burst pipes in the master bath!), 1200sq/ft, 2BR, 2BA, we’re getting a 2BR, 2.5BA, 1800sq/ft brick house, with a (blissfully dry) basement on 2.1 acres. Abby the Dog is going to be so psyched! Drew says “It’s going to be from famine to feast for the baby!” There’s also a pool, which is empty & covered right now; we may not do anything with it because of the maintenance cost/time.

While our apartment is really cosmetically nice, there’s something about having a yard, garage, and basement that we’ve really been missing. We love the wood floors, the kitchen makes our “foodie” hearts happy (granite counters, spacious cabinets, and gas stove), and the bedrooms are huge. The best part though is the yard – I just can’t wait for Abby to be able to run around and hassle the wildlife!
The past couple days have been rough – there’s this great hope that everything would work out, but this fear that it might fall through or we could jinx it somehow. I don’t think either of us has slept very well with visions of furniture configurations dancing through our heads. It will be fun, now that it’s settled, to think about how we want to make this house our home.



The top picture is of the living room; you first walk in through double doors opposite the french ones in the photo. I’m picturing this spot on the right of those doors for my stitching nest!

The next photo is of the back yard - the property is quite deep, that fence you see is a dog run. To the right is the pool.

The last photo is of the family/hearth room. It's taken from the kitchen, which is open to this room.