At last, the new house!

As usual, I'm starting with an apology for my tardiness.  Sorry!  As you can imagine, our lives are continuing in a state of transition as we move from wandering grad school students to fully employed, home-owning adults.  With this move, into a home we intend to stay in for years (plural!), it's been fun to review where we've been.  In the last 10 years, since I graduated from East High and my address changed from 457, I have lived at addresses (or PO Boxes) 312C, 512, 410, 290, 5155, 5404, 2138, and now 5232.  That's a total of 8 moves in 10 years, in 5 different states in 2 countries.  Katie follows closely with 7 moves of her own.  Even Scout, who celebrated her 3 year adoption anniversary a week ago has 3 of her own!  So we are quite ready to not make any changes to our address numbers for a while, and thereby avoid the DMV too!

We've enjoyed looking at houses for years, thinking about what we'd want and what we could afford.  But it became a real endeavor kind of by accident when we were walking through open houses and found an agent we liked.  For the geographically minded, we were looking at mostly inner-ring suburbs on the north side of Chicago.  We probably saw around 50 homes, in 7 or 8 different cities, however we couldn't shake Skokie.  We initially met our agent just over a mile from our current house and the home we put in an offer on but lost was 2 blocks from there.  The very first house we walked in to during open houses on our own is less than a block away from our current address.  I don't know Hutchinson's housing stock too well, but Skokie compares well to Wichita just east of College Hill.  It was begun in the early 1900s, grew steadily through the second World War, and then was built out quickly during the postwar era.  It's a fascinating development pattern as some 1930's 3-flats sit next to 1960's ranch homes in places.

The architectural diversity is complemented by really impressive social diversity.  While Skokie used to be known as a hub for Chicago's Jewish culture (and still is institutionally speaking), it has become known as a city with a mix of everyone.  Across the street, we have a family who lives in the house the mother's grandparents grew up in, while next door on either side are a first generation Indian family and a Hispanic-Asian couple and their kids.

We're about a 7 minute walk to the downtown core of the suburb, which has an exciting restaurant scene, and about a 12 minute walk to the Yellow Line el stop.  It's also an 8 minute drive to my work, which is across the parking lot from the hotel everyone stayed in for the wedding.  Needless to say, we're really excited about the location.

But that's not what you want to see, is it?  Well here you go, pictures!  We're going to do it in a before -and-after style, with the original pictures from the listing followed by ones I took today.  Apologies for some of the rooms being less than ideally presentable, we do live here after all!

 Let's start with the front of the house (Google Street View):

Screen Porch off the back of the house:

The basement family room:

3rd Bedroom/Office:

The kitchen is pretty much the same:

And without further ado, here's what took so long! The living/dining room:

Check out behind the mirrors!

And our biggest addition of all:

Our address is 5232 Madison St. Skokie, IL 60077.  If you're in the Chicago area, we have 2 extra bedrooms, so bring your friends!  We're hosting Thanksgiving in a couple weeks so it's our first run as hosts of a big family gathering (14 people!).  Hopefully we can share some photos from the holiday!

Love to all!

Andrew and Katie