Our place

Here's the story, if you haven't heard it yet:

In June, I started really aggressively searching for a place up closer to the U of U for us to live. I knew we could live in family housing there at the U for just below $1100 with all the utilities included, but I really really didn't want to. It's full on apartment living, with cinder block walls, tiny tiny kitchens and paper-thin carpet. It just made me depressed to think about. So I was determined to find somewhere else, for about the same price, within 20 minutes of the U.

But try as I did, we had no luck with anywhere. We were getting quite discouraged. So at the end of a phone call with his parents, when Sam's mom asked him, "Is there anything we can do for you?" When he normally says no, he said (not seriously) "You can buy us a house."

Well being the people they are, they hopped on KSL, and before we knew it they had bought us a mobile home. Seriously! Insane!! It's about five minutes North of Fort Union, bordering both Holladay and Murray. It's theirs, they bought it cash and will sell it after we move out...but it's a tremendous blessing for now. Because they bought it cash they don't have to pay for a mortgage, so neither do we. But because it's in one of those...'mobile home communities,' aka a trailer park, the land that it's on isn't owned by them. So it's kind of like having landlords, in that way. We are responsible for what's called a lot fee, and all the utilities.

This is $200 cheaper than the family housing would have been, and I feel insanely blessed to live here. We have a two-car carport, a garage, a small room on the north side of the garage for storage, a larger room on the west side of the garage that Sam uses as his study, a small backyard with a built-in swingset/slide thing, a large front porch, imitation hardwood floors through the main part of it, a laundry room (bigger than our last one, actually), a wood-burning stove, and just overall a nicer interior than we possibly could have had in the apartment we would have lived in. We also are located right next to this big stretch of grass, which if you know how closely the mobile homes in this mobile home park are positioned, you know how lucky that is. Our kids play on it all the time.

I'm wanting to paint our bookcases a white/greyish, re-do our buffet, and re-stain/paint a stenciled design on an old nightstand Sam built in high school for our current home. So it's still not all the way 'un-packed.' But all the rooms are finally functional, which I'm loving.

Surprisingly, the actual place itself...it's really feeling like home, now. It is smaller than our last (1100 square feet, vs. the 1500 we moved from), but I feel like I'm using the space better this time. Each room has a purpose, and we spend our days filling up the full house.

I do still miss Springville terribly, as well as our old backyard and the lack of through traffic where we used to live (we live right near the entrance to the mobile home park so there's a ton here). And I HATE how much smoking is present in this general area. It seems like everyone in Murray (a block to the west of us, with Holladay a block to the east) smokes. Blegh, so gross.

Still, even with the downsides this really does feel like a perfect fit for our family at this stage of life we're in.

So I recorded a walk-through. I did it when the majority of rooms were clean, but the main bathroom, laundry room and especially garage are still a disaster...oh well, we're keeping it real, folks. :)

So here's that. You'll have to come over to play, everyone! :)