Could this Work?

Our family has now fully settled--well, maybe not fully--into our new home here in the Valley. Our family move has proven to be much more taxing than we thought it would be. We have faced emotional and financial hurdles that we were not expecting. While our new blog might not wet the "exotic" pallet of readers, we hope it will be an interesting read nonetheless.

Several months ago, Hubs applied for a position with the Department of Interior. The position caught our interest because it's in my hometown. Our initial thought was that it would be close to my family and all of the emotional support that comes with it; and we were ready to come "home". Home for us could be just about anywhere in America, but we did prefer to be next to some family. What Hubs thought would be a "long-shot" position to get into here turned out to come very easily and we soon found ourselves moving back from Japan to Northern California.

The first plan that we had was for us to buy a home in the suburbs and for Hubs to commute to work everyday. However, although this idea sounded like the logical smart idea, we decided that we would take a chance with the housing market the way it was. We decided to buy a "fixer/older" home closer to his work. Although this neighborhood isn't "rough", it's definitely not the suburbs and the schools in the area are rated low. The home was less expensive, leaving room in our budget for Eldest to go to private school. Also, with the mortgage being so low, we could work on fixing it up and then several years down the road sell it, or rent it out (the latter being our preference).

My family did have some apprehensions about our plan, but we did it anyway. It's been a lot harder than we thought. The home that we purchased is a really cute 1950's style cottage home. The lot size is almost a quarter of an acre, which in the city is a good sized lot. Hubs has absolutely no carpentry skills. We are learning as we go. We, or maybe just I, thought that after several months we could have this place looking absolutely adorable. After several times of calling the electrician in the middle of the night and the plumber twice in a week, reality set in really quick. That concrete patio that I want in the back yard may not get done until a year from now because there is a whole portion of our fence that needs to be replaced, there's water running into our garage, our overhead fan in the kitchen isn't working, and the fan to our hallway bathroom isn't working and... should I continue? The neighborhood also leaves a lot to be desired. Although... we are lucky enough to have shopping carts on our street whenever needed and the homeless actually go through our recyclables before waste management comes. How helpful is that?!

Because we believe in paying for most everything in cash, improvements have gone much slower as well. Overseas, we were able to save quite a bit of money, but it's really gone as quickly as water and during our home purchasing adventure we've paid some stupid tax along the way.

So here we are 6 months after arrival, starting to feel human again and with a long laundry list of "to dos". Most likely this will be what our blog is about. Along with some venting frustrations of coming back to reality after a 4 year vacation. I suppose the ever underlying question is this, 'Will we be moving on in a couple or years, or will this be our permanent residence for a long while?'