We're home!!!!!!!

We're finally all moved into our new house! It's so exciting to finally own our own home, and I can't wait to get it all painted just like I want it!! My mom and sister are coming in town today to do just that.

Please continue to pray for us as we wait for Jim to permanently move here. He's still in Michigan off and on until September-ish, and being away when there's so much he wants to do to the outside of the new house is hard for him.

Thank you all for your love and support during our moves to and from Michigan. It was a fun adventure, and we made lots of new, wonderful friends that we hate to leave behind!

Love in HIM,

Jim and Ally

We're almost there!!

We're in Atlanta for the weekend, and we close on Monday! We are so excited about having our own place, painting, and then THROWING AWAY the boxes!! This will be our 5th move in 3 years of marriage! I am so ready to be stationary for a while! We'd appreciate your prayers while we're getting everything moved down from Michigan next weekend. It will be a party for sure... haha!



Let us know if you're in the Atlanta area and need a place to stay because we'd love to have some company!



Love to all,

Jim and Ally

Update on our house

We wanted to catch everyone up on our house drama. It's official!! We have finished negotiating price and repairs with the sellers, and we got our loan approval today. So short of a major catastrophe, we'll be closing on July 20 and moving down on July 24. I am sooooo excited about finally having a house of our own that I can paint and decorate however I want to, where we can hang as many pictures as we want without worrying about getting docked because we left too many holes in the wall, and where we can start a family (God willing). Thank you so much for all of your prayers!

We will have plenty of extra rooms (and a pool!) for guests, and once we get moved in, we'd LOVE to have visitors!! To my Michigander friends, we are holding you guys to your promise of a Life Group field trip to Georgia!! I'm missing you already just thinking about moving!

Love to all,
Jim and Ally

OUR HOUSE!!!

I just got back yesterday from an exhausting (but wonderful) trip to Atlanta for graduation and house hunting. I have sooooo many awesome "God moments" to share about the trip, but I'll do that in a separate post.

My mom and sister were able to come up for this house hunting trip, which was nice, and we all stayed with a friend of mine (that I taught with at Grayson), who graciously opened her home up to us! It was so good for all three of them to have faces to put with names since I talk about them to each other all the time! haha!

We looked at houses Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I think we saw 18+ houses, and let me tell you we were beat by the end! BUT.......... we found one!

I had decided that I would not post pictures this time until we offered and knew that it had been accepted, and after many offers and counter offers (over just one day!!), we are finally under contract! (Yes, already! Things work much faster when you are working with real people instead of a bank!!)

The house was built in 1986, so it's a little older, but it has been very well maintained. It has four bedrooms, two and half baths, a large back yard, and almost everything else we wanted!

Please pray that the inspections and closing will go well (if this is indeed the house God has picked for us.) Check out the pictures below and let me know what you think!

Ally

Here's a view from the street.

Here I'm in the formal living room/ office/photography studio. ;) You can see through the foyer into the formal dining room. If you walked out and went directly left, you would walk into the den. (I thought this photo would help give you perspective.)



This is the formal dining room. It's already the color that I wanted to paint mine! Just to the right you can see the doorway into the kitchen.


The kitchen is pretty small, but you can't have everything!


This is the doorway from the kitchen into the hallway that connects it to the den. To give you perspective if you walked into the kitchen from the formal dining room, this doorway would be on your right and the breakfast room (which I some how didn't get a photo of) would be directly in front of you.






If you walk down the hallway above, the doorway on your left is this half bath.


Here's the den. I love the fireplace!

If we went back into the foyer and walked upstairs, the master bedroom would be to the left at the top of the stairs.

I didn't get very good photos of the master bathroom. Just know that it's HUGE! And has his and her sinks and a large walk-in closet!

If you went back out to the hallway, the washer/dryer closet would be immediately on your left (across from the stairs) and the first guest room (above) would be on your right shortly thereafter.

If you continue down the hallway this full bath is on your left.

Past the bathroom, on the left is the bedroom above and on the right is the bedroom below.

If you go back downstairs to the hallway between the kitchen and den, the half bath is on the left and on the right are stairs leading down the the partial basement (below) to the right at the bottom of the stairs and the garage (above) to the left at the bottom of the stairs .

If you walk out the garage doors, you would see this little building (with an window air conditioning unit). Look at the awesome cabinet space inside (below). This litte house would make an awesome school room!

Back inside, if you walk through the kitchen into the breakfast room, the door to this large screened porch would be on your right.

The back yard is huge compared to everything else we looked at! And we didn't really want a pool, but when the rest of the house was perfect, we decided that we could deal with it. (Plus it might be nice since this neighborhood doesn't have a pool.)

View from the back yard. (I'm standing about halfway back.) I love the back yard, and I know that Jim will spend hours there!

Final update on house #2

Well... we lost the house. They accepted another offer, so I guess we'll be going for round 3. Hopefully third time's the charm. Please pray for patience and wisdom about when to make another visist down south to look around. I'll be in Nicaragua from April 23 to May 6, so hopefully in the meantime LOTS of new great houses will come on the market. Thanks for your prayers on this house!

Waiting on the Lord,
Jim and Ally

Upate on house #2

We made an offer on the house last Monday (4-6-09) and set our deadline at 6PM on Wednesday, but we didn't hear back from them by then. We knew they were probably waiting to get back with us becuase they were hoping for multiple offers. And lo and behold, when they did finally get back with us Friday afternoon at about 4:30, it was to tell us that there were now multiple offers and they wanted our best and final by Monday at 9AM. BLAH!!! Hmmm... that left us NO business hours to work with our bank on the whole loan thing. (This whole thing has been pretty sketch!) So we prayed about it and talked about it, and Jim and I felt at peace offering the asking price. That was Monday (4-13-09), and we're still waiting for an answer. Please pray for patience for us as well as God's will for our future home, wherever it may be! Thanks!

Blessings,
Jim and Ally

Home front update

We got back last night from a long weekend of looking at houses. It was a lot different having Jim with me down there. We had selected about 12-14 houses to look over the weeekend, and intended to look at 4-5 on Friday, the rest on Saturday and save Sunday afternoon and Monday morning for revisiting our favorites and possibly making an offer. Jim was much more... ummm... sure of what he liked or didn't like. This meant that with most of the houses we walked into Jim was ready to leave very quickly, so we ended up seeing all but two houses the first day. Only one of those seemed promising to Jim and I had a definite "UN-peace" about that one, so we decided not to make an offer.

Thankfully, Kimberly, our friend and wonderful realtor found about 5-6 more houses for us to look at on Saturday, and low and behold, the second one we saw that day seemed like a keeper. It is in a nice neighborhood where most of the houses are out of our price range, but since it's a forclosure, the price is right in our target range! There are some definite updates that could be done (especially in the front and back yards), but the house has been freshly painted and new carpet installed, so it would be move-in ready! It is in the perfect location for Jim's commute (or at least as good as it's gonna get.) and the neighborhood has a pool, tennis courts and a lake! Jim and I did decide to put an offer in, and we should know by tomorrow night at the latest if the bank will accept/reject our offer or counter it.

Check out the pictures (sorry... I didn't do the best job with them this time), and let me know what you think. Please keep us in your prayers as we wait to hear from the bank.

Giving Him the glory in all that we do,

The Garrisons

View from the street.

A closer view of the front.

Here, I'm standing at the front door looking in. To my left is the formal sitting room (below), to the right are the stairs, and straight ahead is the kitchen, breakfast room and den.

Standing in the formal living room. To my right is the front door (above) and to the left is the formal dining room (below).

(You can just barely see into the kitchen to the right of the dining room.)

(Above) This is the view through the formal dining room doorway into the kitchen.

This is the kitchen. The formica counter tops are new, as well as the linolium flooring. And I LOVE the window over the sink... I NEED light in my house!

This is the den.

Here's the half bath, which is basically in the foyer on the left just before you walk into the kitchen.

This is the master bedroom (bad picture!). It's a small master (14'8''x 14'4"), but the master bathroom and closet (both below) are nice.

(Standing outside the master bedroom looking down the hall.)

If I keep walking down the hall, on my left is the first and largest guest room (above) and to my right the laundry closet (below).

Next I pass the hall bath on my right (above) and two more guest rooms on my left and right respectively (below).

Here's the back yard. It is defnitely not large, but it's great for a first house. The property is only about .22 acres total. It is very uneven, so we would do a lot of work to it, which Jim is thrilled about because he has been dying to have a yard that he can work in! (I know... wierd right!)

On the home front...

Well... we're heading back to ATL this weekend to look for houses. Please pray for us. Pray that if one of these houses is the one that God has for us, we will know it when we see it, and if He's not prepared to show it to us yet, we will patiently bide our time and wait until he does. Thanks!

Ally

House news...

So it looks like we've lost the house. The seller accepted another offer, and the only way ours will be considered is if something falls through with this one. It seems like the good houses are flying off the market, so we're just not looking much online until right before we head down there again in a week to look at other houses. Please pray that when we see the house that God has for us, we will know it so that we can put in an offer quickly.

Ally

House news...

Well... we put an offer in on the house today, but it may be several days before we hear anything, so keep us in your prayers as we wait. There are four other offers on the table, so we just have to hope that ours was good enough to win. Or if not, God's got a better place in mind for us that He hasn't shown us yet. We'll keep you updated.

Ally

Our pick

Well... it's about that time. Time for Jim and I to start looking for houses in Atlanta that is.

I went down for a Bridal shower last weekend and spent Friday, Sunday afternoon and Monday looking at houses and getting TONS of pictures to bring back to Jim. Here are the pictures for the one we really like. I'm posting them mostly so that my parents can see the pics (since they're too big to email) but hope the rest of you enjoy them too.

Please pray for us as we search and wait for God's will for us in choosing a house.

In Him,

Ally

I'm standing in the foyer. To the right is a formal sitting room (front) and formal dining room (back).

Still in the foyer. To the left is the half bath and beyond that the kitchen. (Somehow I missed getting a picture of the kitchen.) The den (below) is to the left of the kitchen.

All bedrooms are upstairs. Here is the master bedroom, bathroom and LARGE walk-in closet.

Here I'm standing outside the master getting a picture towards two of the other bedrooms (and I think the hall bathroom).

The hall bathroom would definitely need a new paint color.)

These are two of the three extra bedrooms (the top one has a walk-in closet).

This is the finished part of the basement, which is a BIG plus for us. (It also has an unfinished part for storage!)

Here is another shot of the finished basement. If you walk over to the shelves in the above pictures and take a right, this is what you'll see.

Here is the back yard. This is the one drawback since it's VERY shallow, but it is wide, and the view behind the house will be really pretty in the fall.