The Shopoff Showoff: April 2008

A Camping We Will Go

2 comments Posted by Shopoff Family at 6:42 PM

Last weekend, we decided to take a break from the weekend house-projects and spend a weekend camping in Beavers Bend State Park near Broken Bow, Oklahoma. What a great time! The area is really beautiful and the weather was wonderful. It was nice to spend time in God's creation and be reminded of his awesomeness. This was the first time that we have been camping since we got Kaiko, so we decided to test her out with the camping thing. Even she enjoyed it! She slept great in the tent, went hiking with us, and was friendly to all of the other campers. We did find out what kind of guard dog she is though...in that she isn't one at all. Raccoons decided to try to invade one of our tubs of food in the middle of the night. Was she the one who alerted us to the raiding critters? No. She just kept right on sleeping. When I got up and discovered what the noises were, was she the one to get out and chase them away? No. She looked up for a second before returning to her deep sleep. Ha! Oh well...it was a great time anyway. Here are some of the pictures.

Home Sweet Home!

4 comments Posted by Shopoff Family at 3:06 PM

I know that these pictures are long overdue, and many of you have been begging for me to get them up here. Well...you will be at least partly happy, because I am finally getting some up.

First, you should hear the story of our house hunting adventure. Patrick and I have been talking about buying a house for a few months now. We decided that we would try to move into a house after our lease is up in May. We figured that we should start looking a few months ahead of time to be sure that everything was finalized before our lease ended. We drove around on our own for a few weekends in February looking at different neighborhoods and areas trying to get an idea of where we wanted to be.

We decided to go ahead and get a realtor to begin showing us places, because we had no idea how long it might take us to find "the house". I was really worried about being able to find a good realtor so I began to ask around at school for recommendations. One of the teachers across the hall pointed us toward Katherine. I called her one afternoon and just told her what we were looking for and gave her the addresses of a few properties we were looking at. From the very beginning, she was just absolutely incredible! She answered all of our questions and told us she would meet with us on Saturday to start looking at houses.

So we met with her on Saturday, February 16th, and we spent the ENTIRE day looking at houses. After looking at more than 10 properties, we had found a few that we "decent" but none that we absolutely loved. Katherine told us to go home, look online for more properties, and call her on Sunday. We called her the next day, and again we spent the day out looking at more houses. We found one house that didn't have any "negatives" to it, but it wasn't just amazing either. Katherine told us, "This is your first home. You have to love it!" We talked that night and realized that we didn't love it, but it was the closest to what we were looking for. I decided to look for more houses in that neighborhood. I got online and began hunting. I came across another house in the neighborhood that was a lot bigger and seemed to be a better layout. Patrick told me to go with Katherine on Monday(I had the day off) to look at the house.

Monday I showed up to the house and Katherine had already been looking through the house for a few minutes. She met me at the door and said, "This could be it!" I wasn't convinced until I walked inside. Sure enough, it had everything we wanted. It had an office, very open floorplan, large master bedroom and bathroom, great kitchen, and a decent backyard for Kaiko. It even had an added bonus, a gameroom upstairs! I was immediately convinced that this was the house. I LOVED it! I called Patrick and told him to meet us at the house after he got off work.

Patrick met us at the house and after he walked through, he said, "Alright. Let's make an offer." We both agreed...this was what we were looking for. We met on Wednesday(remember this is only 4 days after we started our real "house hunt") and put in an offer. On Thursday, we negotiated a bit and our offer was finally accepted. We closed on March 12th, the week before my Spring Break. We figured we would be able to paint, get some work done, and move in over my break.

It was a crazy week of very hard work! I painted all of the baseboards in the house, which doesn't seem too terribly bad until you consider that if you paint the baseboards, you have to paint the doorframes and if you paint the doorframes, you have to paint the doors. It quickly grew into a huge project! It was well-worth the work, because it really did make a big difference. We also painted the master bedroom(twice after we had a paint color disaster the first time) and the guestroom. I couldn't have done all of the painting without my mom and dad here to help! We also did some yard work, fixed some of the fence(thanks, Dad!), and some cleaning. All in all, it was a rewarding week after the work was done.

Next came moving day, April 22nd. It was the most amazing move I've ever experienced! Within four hours, we had...everything loaded into the truck at the apartment, everything unloaded into the house, beds put together, and washer and dryer hooked up. It was quite impressive! I owe it all to Patrick's parents, my parents, my uncle and the awesome help that he brought along. THANK YOU!!! Of course, it didn't hurt that I was my organized self and had everything perfectly color-coded and mapped out. ha!

So, we are happily settling into our new house now. We have successfully completed our first major home-improvement project, a trash drawer replacing one of our kitchen cabinets(I say major because it took major work and two weekends to complete) but it does work now! We are still decorating and unpacking the last of the boxes, but I know that will go on for quite a while.

Here are a few pictures of our house, and a few pictures of us working on the house. Once everything is really decorated and together, I'll add more pics of the inside. Enjoy!