Finding our house

Chris and I knew we wanted to come back to Montana once we started having kids.  We both grew up here and knew we wanted to raise our family here.  We loved Seattle, but felt Montana was a better fit for our family.  The beginning of 2009 we started looking online for houses in Missoula. We were not seriously looking, just seeing what was out there and starting to get an idea of what was available, neighborhoods, prices, etc.

I should also mention, that we were not very happy with the place we were renting.  Although it was in a great location and our commute to work was less than 10 minutes, it was an older house that needed some updating.  We had done a little updating ourself, but didn't want to put too much money into it because we were only renting.  The one thing our landlord did while were living there was paint the house purple!  We came home from work one day and it was purple.  We were a little annoyed and ready to get out of there.

We had visited our friends Matt and Katie and their little boy, Thatcher (who is just a few weeks older than Parker), in Missoula, over Christmas, in 2008 and loved the neighborhood they lived in.  We or at least I was hoping to find a house in the same neighborhood.

Well, our search didn't take long at all.  The end of January, we found our house on Craigslist and as luck would have it, the house was in the neighborhood we wanted.  I was so excited!  The only picture posted in the ad, was an exterior picture, but we knew we wanted it.  I made Chris e-mail the seller right away.  About a week later, after asking Chris multiple times a day if he had heard anything about the house, the seller finally e-mailed us back.  Since we were in Seattle, it wasn't super easy for us to look at the house.  Luckily my parents were only a couple hours away and made a trip over to Missoula to look for us.  They were super excited about the idea of having Parker 115 miles away instead of 600 miles.  They liked the house and took pictures for us.  After talking to them and looking through the pictures, Chris and I made an offer on our house, contingent on us looking at the house the following weekend.  We had a 3 day weekend, so we took Parker on a little road trip to Missoula, to look at our new house.  We loved it, our offer was official!  There was a nice family renting the house and they were in no hurry to move, so that gave us time to wrap things up in Seattle before we were ready to make our big move.  I don't think either Chris or I thought we would find our house as quickly as we did, but it was meant to be.

It was hard to leave Seattle and say goodbye to our friends and a job I loved, but we were ready for a new adventure with our little boy.  So, at the end of June we packed up our purple house and headed east, to Missoula, MT.

Loading the U-Haul in Washington

Our new house!

Happy to be out of the car and in our new home

Cheers!