Top 5: Must-Haves for Our New Home

People often ask about the features of our new home, and I tell them that there were certain non-negotiable criteria for our second house. We knew we wanted the following amenities in our new home, so we didn't even receive information about homes that didn't have all of these. Therefore, all of the houses we went to see had at least these characteristics:

• FYI - Although I usually make my "Top 5" list in order of least to greatest importance, these five things are listed in no particular order. They are all relatively equal.

1. 4 Bedrooms - Wait! Let it be known that we are not opposed to having our kids share a room at all! In fact, we WANT them to share a room (after all we both had to and it made us... well, who we are today).

• Since we are still planning on having three kids, at least two of them will share a room because we are keeping a guest bedroom. We knew when searching for a new place that we wanted a bedroom for our many guests. We love having visitors and we love the fact that we are able to offer them some place to stay when they need it, instead of having to pay for a hotel room.  And our friends and family mean too much to us to make them sleep on a couch or an air mattress (unless of course TONS of people are crashing at our house, which is fun... but rare.) 
• Having said this, if baby #2 is a girl there may be a time when each kid has their own room because the youngest will be in the nursery. If baby #2 is a boy, we will most likely buy bunk beds for our two boys and then use the nursery for baby #3, keeping the guest bedroom in tact. Regardless, in the long run two of our kids will share a room and we will keep the fourth bedroom for our family and friends!

2. Attached Garage - Oh man, this will be nice when it's snowing and/or raining. I've NEVER had the privilege of parking in a real garage before! I feel like such a grownup. How exciting!!!

• I picture a much easier winter with a carseat now that we will have an attached garage.  When William was only 3 1/2 months old, I slipped on the ice after stepping down from our side porch steps and sprained my ankle.  Having an attached garage isn't going to keep me from spraining an ankle, since that can happen anywhere, but I am thankful I won't have to worry AS much.  The best benefit is not having to scrape my windshield in the morning, not that I did that much anyway... thank you honey!!! ;-)

3. Fireplace - It will feel more like Christmas now that we have a fireplace! Although Dom would have preferred a wood-burning one, I'm happy that the home we're buying has a gas one... Easy on, easy off!  It's like magic!

4. Master Bathroom - Honestly this will come in handy during all of the middle-of-the-night pee sessions for my third pregnancy... and possibly early morning or late night barf sessions as well. What? Was that too much info? Hey, you're the one who chose to read my blog!  And let me tell ya, morning sickness doesn't just occur in the morning.  That's a fallacy!

5. Basement - Chalk this one up to the eternal fear of tornadoes that has been instilled in me and add it on to the fact that I loooooove all the extra living space a basement provides. I could never buy a home without a basement. It's just not in my blood.  This is the only feature of the five that we currently have in our home, but the basement where we are headed is MUCH larger.  It'll be a nice additional living space.

* A bonus of the house we are buying that I wasn't banking on ANYWHERE in Perrysburg, but that we lucked out with here is something I knew I definitely wanted one day - * MORE LAND AND A SWEET BACKYARD!!! *

• In Perrysburg, many houses are backed up by other houses, a major high-way, or a railroad track.  There aren't many ideal pieces of backyard property (at least within our price range), so we worked with what we could get.  We ended up finding a home with a beautiful private corner lot with mature trees (mature trees were pretty much must-haves for Dom.) The downfall of this house is that the turnpike runs behind it.  A plus is that you can't SEE the turnpike from our backyard, but you can definitely hear it.  OK, so we can't have our cake and eat it too... we'll get used to the sound and hopefully it'll serve as sort of a sound machine for our kids!