NEWS!! NEWS!! NEWS!!
I'm going to skip updating the rest of our lives for a bit (mainly Thanksgiving, Christmas and NY) and update as to what is going on in our lives right now. We're going to buy a house! We'd decided we could afford to rent a house finally and so in January we started looking at rentals so we could get out of this apt., and there was just a bunch of crap out there. We'd noticed several nice rentals for rent in December that were decently priced, but apparently those were all snatched up. Anyway, we crunched numbers and figured out that it was actually cheaper for us to buy. We were kind of worried about making the payments, but knew we could go somewhat higher than what we're paying for rent. We decided to get a pre approved loan. The day before we'd planned on going in, we found out Chad got a very, very significant pay raise, one we weren't expecting for a long time, so we were stoked that we could for sure now afford the new house payment. We still have our mortgage on our home in OR, and that throws us a curve ball, but we're staying in way under top budget for the new house so we're not house poor. I've been looking now for the past several weeks, and after going through all our options on the type, size, requirements we have for our house and yard, we decided to buy new. We put our good faith money down on a lot. The lot is smaller than we want, but the home floorplan has everything we wanted and then some. We had to decide what was the most import thing, the home itself or the lot. We'll still be able to fit our boat in rv parking and have a small pool. We're in the area we wanted, but not in the exact neighborhood, although all neighborhoods within this main neighborhood was fine with us. We'll be close to the new high school and shopping at the stores we frequent. We're kind of city lovers, so this works out fine. We for sure decided we did not want to be in a neighborhood out of town.

Here are some pictures of the lot. They're taken from the cell phone, so quality isn't there.