The Search

After a few months of feeling like we needed to look elsewhere to live, we began the search.  We thought a lot about location.  Should we move out of Gibert and into Queen Creek for Stephen to be closer to work?  There were pros and cons.  The prices were cheaper in Queen Creek but we would be in a less desirable school district and much farther away from shopping, the dance studio, friends, the temple, etc.  We thought we knew the exact location where we should live.  Right on the border between the two, so we could all be happy.  We looked at a lot of houses.  Many were almost perfect, but we never felt right about any of them.  There were a few close calls, where we thought we had found "the one" but then we would slow down and think about it.  And we would always be led away from that home.  We had tossed around the idea of building our own home here and there but it seemed so overwhelming, especially since there were a lot of great houses on the market.  At the end of the day, we realized that we wanted a few key features in our forever home and that we weren't willing to go without them.  We would rather stay where we were than buy a home that we didn't love.  Around this time we came across a one-acre lot for sale in a great neighborhood nearby.  It was destined to be.  Unbeknownst to us, the owner of the lot was a friend's Dad and he was willing to make a great offer to unload the property.  We agreed to the terms and felt totally at peace.  We had bought some property on Plum Ct.  We closed in October of 2011.  We weren't sure when we would build, but we were sure glad to have our land securely in our hands.

Jaren at the lot, October 2011: