Homeward Bound

This morning, I stood in line to go to the bathroom. It was 6:06 a.m. and, in the previous four minutes, I had woken up, changed Riley's Pull-Up, got him dressed and started brushing his teeth. Just before I made my way over to conduct my morning relieving ritual, Holden came running in to the bathroom, pulling off his pajama bottoms, saying something about poop.

So there we were: Riley on the stool brushing his teeth; Holden on the pot; Kevin in the shower and me bouncing around on the floor waiting for my turn. All four of us, cozy in our one-and-only little bathroom.

No. More.

We always suspected we'd outgrow our three bedroom, one bathroom house. We always knew we'd have to move before the kids got too deep into school. We now know that the time has come.

About two months ago, we embarked on what we thought was a fact-finding mission with a real estate agent who claims our neighborhood as his territory. He actually represented the sellers of our house when we bought it in 2002. We wanted to pick his brain about price points, preparations and possibilities. He didn't have a lot encouraging things to say, and was kind of blase about our HGTV knowledge of open house staging. So we sent him on his way and thought to ourselves, "Eh, in a month or so, we'll maybe do this."

That weekend, we had the opportunity to hit some open houses in the area we thought would be right for us. What we found were very old, small and dilapidated houses in so-so neighborhoods that weren't much better than ours - just more money. On a whim, we decided to take a look at a townhome in a complex that immediately had us shaking our heads and complaining of claustrophobia.

But inside? Wow! For the same price as the crappy houses we were looking at, we could have all kinds of big, newer and beautiful living space. A spark was lit and we were smitten.

That week, we got a Pod delivered to our driveway, which we loaded with excess furniture, knick-knacks, toys and such. We cleaned our little hearts out over the next few days and had a show-worthy home we were proud of by the next weekend.

Three weeks later, dueling bids on the same weekend helped us get a fair price, and we sold our first house. The next day, we put an offer on a townhome we had seen recently and always kept in our minds. After 40 days on the market, we bid - and so did someone else. And we lost. But it took a week for the negotiation process to go, and the clock was ticking on our 45-day escrow. Stress levels were going through the roof.

So we bid on our second favorite townhome, which had been on the market 30 days with no offers. Of course, so did two other buyers. We low-balled and didn't think we'd have a shot, but hung in there for more than a week of negotiations and were getting quite close to an accord. With the ball in our court, we took one last spin around town to see a few new listings before making anymore moves.

That's when we came upon Ruxton Place - a new townhome complex we'd known about, but couldn't find a lot of information on. We lucked out huge and snagged the sales manager, who showed us around and made us fall in love. Two days later, we gave them a deposit and reserved our brand spankin' new townhome in Redondo Beach.

There's still some hurdles. We can't go into escrow for 30 days, and Lord knows what will happen between now and then. And there's escrow. Hopefully, if all works out well, we'll be in by the end of May. Earlier in May, we'll be taking up residence with Grandma Bonnie, who couldn't be more thrilled to get her hands on those kids on a daily basis. AND, she has three bathrooms.

Here's our new pad: