That kitchen I thought I was going to have to live with won’t be mine after all. (Yes!) The deal fell through — won’t bore you with the details — but our agent was not happy with the sellers and their agent, let’s leave it at that. Made an offer on another house the evening after I posted, that had this kitchen:

but the guy was out deerhunting and didn’t want his wife to sign the papers without him. He planned to come home Sunday to sign the papers AFTER their open house. This was in a house that had the master bedroom downstairs so we weren’t too happy with that one either. To make a long story short, we didn’t like the way they were stringing us, just left a bad taste in the mouth when we had already upped our offer more than we wanted to. So Friday night I spent 4 more hours crawling the ‘net looking for more houses to look at, and hubby helped me map and get directions, etc. Saturday we left the kids sleeping and drove around to see 40 houses in several neighborhoods, at 6:30 am! (Yes, hubby and I were *that* determined to finish this goal.) By 9:30 we were back at the hotel and fed the kids brunch. We looked at three more houses — one which had a tremendous flat yard and flat driveway with a basketball hoop! — perfect for hubby and the kids (okay, and I’ll try to shoot some myself). But the house was in a bit of disrepair and just wasn’t worth the time or money to get back into shape (with 4 kids, hard to think of any major do-it-yourself jobs at this point). The other 2 were new construction but the kitchens were still small, though they had nice 3-car garages LOL. By 3 yesterday we were at the builder’s office drawing up plans. Drove around again and showed the kids the lot where the house is going to be built.

YES! This kitchen has been in my mental drawing board for 12 YEARS (since the time I got Kitchens, still a classic if you want to design your own) and on my now-defunct PCs for the past 3 years. You wouldn’t believe the countless nights I spent designing the house and kitchen back in 2003, sometimes staying up ’til 4 in the morning fiddling with the CAD software. It’s going to be a simple house, not a lot of fluff like 2-story foyers and jacuzzis, but it’s going to have my range (or rangetop, still deciding) and Aisa’s oven.

Here we go with spreadsheets etc. Expect at least range and oven comparison charts to be posted in the next couple of weeks. If you’re wanting some information yourself on specific kitchen equipment, etc., let me know and I’ll post it here. The rest of the stuff will be compiled in my “scrapblog” .

To be honest, I’m still in shock and can’t believe hubby actually made the decision to build. But after what we saw and experienced this week, I think we’re doing the right thing. God has always had His way of leading us the right path, even when we don’t know where we’re going. Though I’ve always wanted to build, I was also determined to give househunting my best shot. Between hubby and me, we clocked in more than 20 hours of driving this week just looking. Had any of those folks accepted our offers, we would have bought the first or second house and been happy with it, though the circumstances weren’t ideal. But oh, how sweet it is that this is where we ended up. Thank you Lord. What a great anniversary present. 16 years, 11 days from now:)