We're Open Baby!!!

Dear Blog,
I thought maybe blogging was a thing of the past since my blog friends, dport7 and jCristg had taken a hiatus from blogging that maybe I didn't need to blog either...but it turns out that blogging is in fact still the "cool" thing to do and since these two are my blogging idols, I will return to blogging as well.

Alright, so all of the above was a bunch of shit I just made up but wanted to call them out for not blogging on a regular basis. The fact of the matter is, the store is open baby!!!! Man, I can't believe I've been in Seattle for 4 months already!! Time flies when you work all of the time, try to navigate a new city and buy a house. I don't even know if my old friends from NC would recognize me, I've truly let myself go. I haven't gotten a pedicure or a manicure in the four months I've been here, I don't even paint my nails anymore and let's not even talk about my eyebrows. Yikes!! I think someone needs to stage a Bahama-vention because I just don't know how long I can go on like this. I have a reputation to maintain. Although, all these granola types wouldn't even know the difference.

But, at least I can say that all of this self carelessness has not occurred in vain. The past 4 months I have been scouring Seattle high and low looking for the perfect people to help me open my store. I found them all and trained them and can honestly say I have the best team in Seattle. We have a blast together and they make me laugh and I think I make them laugh, or they're just laughing at me and I don't know the difference.

Back to the opening, we had a great weekend. Our store is absolutely beautiful and we did a great amount of business our opening weekend. I was thrilled and have to admit to tears of joy when the doors opened on Friday morning. It was like seeing the fruits of your labor right before your very eyes. I can honestly say I've never put so much effort and hard work into a job before because I never really cared and I can say with full force that I love my job and I can see myself here for a while. (Let's hope my bosses are thinking the same thing!) I stay up at night thinking of ideas to get our business up, or how we can get out in the community and it doesn't bother me at all. I actually enjoy it.



As for the house, well we are fully moved into the den, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. The office and guest bedroom still need to be unpacked and we'll get to those soon. We went to Home Depot for about an hour on Sunday (wooo hooo) to pick out some paint colors and get the supplies to paint some of the rooms. We're going to paint the den, kitchen and our bedroom ourselves y'all! Can't wait!! I'm totally being sarcastic, I can think of a million other way I would rather spend my free time rather than painting....like get a manicure and pedicure...but I will be happy when our house isn't one boring shade of vanilla.

That's all for now folks!
xoxo,
Alison

It's a done deal folks

Dear Blog,
In these trying economic times, it is possible to buy a home! Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but me being in the mortgage business did help the process if I do say so myself. The whole mortgage process was seamless, even in the face of a crumbling financial system. I think we got in our house at exactly the right time because we locked in our interest rate at 5.625% ! And it's a fixed rate! I'm in love with that rate, it's amazing how much a difference an interest rate can make in a payment. Man, I just re-read this post and it is like so boring.

Anyway, on Friday we signed all of the closing docs and I thought there would be a couple of papers to sign but no, there were like a million. I snapped some pics of the two of us in the escrow woman's office, who was kind of weird by the way, but whatevs she was nice. That whole process was rather tedious. There's so many papers in there that I didn't read, one could have said something about them taking away our house if they didn't like the way we decorated it and I wouldn't have known. I was a signing machine. Aaron on the other hand was inspecting every document thoroughly, thus making our visit with the weird closing lady longer. I guess it's the professor in him. But, now thinking about it, I'm glad someone read the documents. I'm also glad it wasn't me because seriously, booooooring.





Aaron just posted the lovely video I made of the house on his blog, urban cowboy So you can check that there if you so choose.

In other news, my store opens in two weeks!!! I saw it the other day and boy is it bright! They let yours truly pick out the paint colors and I'll let you decide for yourself if you like them or not. I'll be in there this Friday to start unpacking the shipments. I'll snap some pics. I'm also going back to the Vancoov this Tuesday-Thursday for a managers conference and am excited because I get to see all my peeps from Groove Camp back in July/Aug.
If you're paying attention to the chronology of said events you will notice that I have gotten myself out of moving into our new house! God is on my side!

xoxo,
Alison

House, here we come!

Dear Blog,
Well I've been hiding from the subject long enough in fear that if I talked about our big news too soon, it might not come to fruition. My husband however, has not felt that fear and has been shouting from the mountaintops that we are currently in the throes of buying our first home together. I believe he has been updating facebook on every single status since we started this crazy house hunting journey. His status for the past month has been, "Aaron is house hunting!!" "Aaron found a house!" "That house sucked!" "Aaron is house hunting again!" "Aaron put an offer down on a house!" "They didn't accept, house hunting again!" And on and on and on, he makes me laugh. So, I told him when we actually found a house and were about to close then I would be the one to announce the official news since he's been teasing all of y'all for the past month.

So....drumroll....we're about to close on our first home on October 14th!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's really exciting. I've never felt like I had to buy a house before a certain age and I never really minded renting in the past, it was always so convenient. But when we came out to Seattle, I felt like if I had to rent again I would DIE. I couldn't imagine moving out of our temporary apartment into another rented apt or house and then having to move...again. We both felt like with the economy the way it was, and us having enough money for a down payment that now was the time to get into a house. So, major props to Aaron who literally scoured all of Seattle for the perfect house. On all of his days off he and Bella were in the car looking for the Shurts' first home. There were a couple that we put offers on and they didn't work out, but never discouraged he continued the search and then one day he came home and said..."I've found our house." So when I went and looked at it, I knew this was going to be the place for us. It's about 1300 square feet on the outskirts of Seattle in a nice, suburby area. In this move to Seattle, Aaron and I have found out that we love the suburbs. We like nice quiet neighborhoods where there are families and kids...we are not city dwellers. We don't like festivals going on outside of our bedroom door and beercans strewn around the streets where we walk Bella. So...we are moving to the burbs and we couldn't be more excited about it!

So, wish us luck in the moving process and I will post pics when we get all of our furniture inside of it!
Yay!

xoxo,
Al