Our Move to the Lone Star State

     For the four years that we were in the Seattle area, the title to this blog seemed ironic because it's actually fairly cool up there for most of the year, with all the rainy and overcast days.  But now that we're here in Texas, the title fits again.  And it's true, too, because being a California girl living in the cold, grey Seattle area, I need the sun!

     So Mc and I were researching places to live, and we had a few essential criteria and a few that would be nice but aren't essential.

     The essentials:

1. Many, many sunny days throughout the year!  For the vast majority of the year in Seattle, it's either raining or overcast and everything is so grey; no matter how big the windows are in your house, it would still be gloomy inside.  I need the sun's warmth and light!
2. Dancing places, specifically West Coast Swing.  It's something I found out in high school that I have a passion for and it's something I did a lot in my early 20s, and I miss it.  I need an outlet for dancing, and West Coast Swing is my favorite style of dance.  Mc likes the Latin dances, so he can get his dancing fix, too.
3. Somewhere close to one of the voice-acting hubs in the country.  I'm still making steps toward getting into the voice acting business, and I will get more jobs if I'm in an area that's known for it.  That narrowed it down to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and New York City.
4. Good job opportunities for Mc.  He has very marketable skills and he could get a job anywhere, but there are more demands for his skills near bigger cities, and so we couldn't move too far away from major cities.
5. Has an ex-Mormon meetup group.  I belonged to one in Seattle and it helped me though a hard time when I was still fresh out of the Church.  Since I can't talk to Mc about a lot of the things I'm struggling with or frustrated with in that area, I need other people that I can talk to who are going through or went through the same things I am.
6. A little more on the liberal side.  I'm an atheist and there are many places in the country (the Bible Belt especially) where my kids and I would be harassed for my being an atheist, and none of us need that crap in our life.
7. Low crime rate.  Self-explanatory.
8. Good schools.  Also self-explanatory.
9. Lower cost of living.  Seattle has become one of the most expensive areas in the country to live, and so finding somewhere that had a lower cost of living would be pretty easy.  But we didn't want to be living paycheck to paycheck wherever we went, and so keeping housing and tax costs in mind was a must. 

     The non-essentials but what would still be nice:

1. Costco nearby: food storage!
2. Papa Murphy's nearby: the best pizza ever!
3. Cheesecake Factory nearby: awesome kale-quinoa salad... and cheesecake!
4. Roller skating rink nearby: it's something we liked in Seattle and we'd like to keep doing it.

 
     After taking all these things into consideration and narrowing down the different states and cities, we decided to move to: Austin, TX.

• Austin has a large amount of sunny days; the humidity isn't as bad as Houston (although my curly hair loves the humidity!), and it hardly gets any tornadoes, unlike northern Texas.
• It has West Coast Swing dancing.
• It's three hours south of Dallas and so driving to Dallas wouldn't be too bad for VO jobs if I get them.
• Austin has become a large tech hub over the past few years and so Mc would have no trouble finding work here.  Luckily, Amazon gave him special permission to work remotely and so he works from home for now.  So far the arrangement is working out for everyone and I hope it stays that way for a while!
• It used to have an ex-Mormon meetup group, but that's gone now.  There are two up in Dallas, but so far I haven't needed it.
• Austin is fairly liberal, and although Texas is the western-most southern state and there are a lot of fundamentalist Christians out here, the major cities themselves are more accepting.
• The area we live in has a low crime rate and very good schools.
• The cost of living is higher in Austin than in other cities in Texas but it's still affordable (and about half as expensive as Seattle!).
• There is a Costco, Papa Murphy's, and Cheesecake Factory nearby.  We also found an Austin-based restaurant chain called Torchy's Tacos and they're really good.
• There is a roller skating rink here, and they have other fun places like a children's museum, biking trails and things for kids to do.
• Austin is known for being really into music, art, and good food.  Can't go wrong there!

     So here we are.  We're renting a house for a year and we're currently talking about where around here we'd like to get a house of our own and when.  Interest rates are pretty high right now and so we're trying to be smart with our timing.  We'll see where things go from here, but for now I'm much happier already!

Backyard Deck and Updating the House

     It's been over a year since I've written here; I've had a lot going on and didn't feel up to writing, but now I'm motivated to get back to it.  We've moved down to Texas, and before I get to that I want to post about the last of the house improvements that we did to our Seattle house because I'm really proud of them!

     Back when we first moved into this house we knew that the deck would have to be torn down and rebuilt.  One of the previous owners simply had new boards placed over the old ones, which led to both layers rotting and to fungus growing in between the layers.  It was gross.  Not only that, but the railing was very wobbly and it was leaning out toward the yard, which we knew wouldn't be safe for the kids who were 5 and 3 years old at the time.

The following few pictures are in a previous post,

but I'm including them here again for an easy comparison to how it looks now.

A few months later I got fed up with procrastinating the deck and I tore down what I could.

Here's what I uncovered:

 

Because I'm overweight and the under-layer was in such bad shape, I didn't feel safe on top of the deck to take down the rest of it, so a few months later we hired someone to take down the rest for us.

Then the deck area sat like this for over a year and a half, even through the new window and the landscaping we had done.  We just kept the door bolted shut so that the kids wouldn't be able to open it and fall out.

Tracy, the man who did our retaining walls, also does decks and so we hired him again to build us a new deck.  

 And it looks great!  It's sturdy and just the right size and very well-made,
and I love the flagstone that Tracy used to cover and shape the stone slab landing.

     I didn't get a picture of the deck once Mc finished staining it, but now it has a darker brown color and it looks nice and it's more protected from the rain.  (And we did end up repainting that siding to the left of the new deck where the old deck used to be).

     Then Mc and I decided to move that coming Summer.  I'll cover that in the next post.

     We cleaned up the house really well and had an open house, but no offers came in.  This worried me because the Seattle housing market was hot at the time and similar houses were getting offers and closing within a week or two, and we were competing with other newly-built houses in the area.

     The feedback we got from those who attended the open house was that our kitchen looked outdated, namely the countertops and the flooring.  When we first moved in I didn't like our countertops either—I thought the color was ugly—but prospective buyers were more picky now than I was a few years ago.

Getting completely new countertops is expensive and it takes a long time; I had to do something quickly, so I hired a company to resurface our existing countertops, and they turned out pretty good.

     We also repainted the garage doors and the trim around the entire house so it would match the trim on the windows and so it would look more similar to the exteriors of the new houses that were recently built in the area, which it did!  Mc and I painted the trim of the porch the same color as the exterior walls and removed the roofing material, which improved the curb appeal quite a bit (the porch was the last thing we did and I didn't get a picture of it before we moved).  I also changed out the house numbers to stand out more and be seen easily from the street. 

Before, looking rather drab and old:

After, with a crisper and more modern look:

     With all those improvements and a slight price reduction, we finally got an offer; after a little bit of negotiating, we accepted it.  I'm so pleased with the work Mc and I did and that Tracy did!  I just wish it didn't take something big like moving to get me motivated to make the changes that I'd wanted to make for the past three years, you know what I mean?  But you know what: at least we can say that we left the house in much better condition than when we bought it three years before.  😊