a new house and a lesson in real estate photography

From an outsider's perspective, it might appear as though the Davis family enjoys moving.  That's not quite the case, but we are pretty great at the act of moving.  We've been married for nearly 9 years and at the end of July we will have moved for the 10th time.  Yikes!  Now, before you start thinking that we're irresponsible drifters and start thinking nasty thoughts, hear me out!  Some of those moves were early in our marriage when we were in transition before moving to Los Angeles, and two of those moves have been disaster situations (with unforeseen circumstances) where we had to get out quickly.  And in fact, two of those places we lived were home for 2 years.  We might still be living in the house we own in Charlotte were it not for many health and allergy issues with our youngest daughter.  But two of those moves were cross-country and another was to the next state.  Wow, I can hardly believe it's been that many times. At any rate, we moved into our house in Charlottesville in August of last year.  We found a nice 2 bedroom house in the downtown area with a garage, fenced-in yard and everything.  We jumped on it and we've truly enjoyed living here!  But soon after moving in, God blessed us with an addition to our family and we knew that we had already outgrown our quaint house.  Then the management company notified us of what our new rent would be for the next year and we knew we were going to be packing again!

At least this time, we only had to find a place here in town and would likely not be moving more than 5 miles away!  The search was on.  Again, we're pretty professional at the housing hunt and we made use of all our resources.  We recently found a super-nice 3 bedroom house on a circle with a fenced-in backyard that looked like it might work.  We checked it out (probably about the 5th or 6th house we'd seen - several of which were disasters, which is a story for another post) yesterday and fell in love!  We found out today that we got the house and will be signing - get this - a TWO YEAR LEASE - this weekend!  Lookout world, the Davis family might be sticking in one spot for a while!  The house is great.  We can still walk to the downtown mall for our Saturday ritual of farmer's market, coffee, and park.  We will only be two miles from our good friends that live down the street from us now.  And I will be LESS than one mile from work.  In fact, it would take longer for me to drive to work than it would to ride my bike because on my bike, I can cut through a large park that backs up to my school!  Are you catching a glimpse of why we're pumped?

Now comes the lesson in real estate photography.  Below are a few pictures from the realtor's website.  They are nicely lit and very enticing -  a striking contrast to most images of rentals we had seen.  But as I was studying them before we viewed the house, they seemed a bit odd.  I could easily tell that they'd been shot with a super-wide angle lens which was smart because it makes the rooms look nice and wide open.  But there was more to it than that.  They seemed very stretched out.  Not only did they try to deceive with a wide angle, they stretched the photos out in post-processing to make the rooms even larger.  Looking at these images after viewing the house make me laugh because I tell how stretched they really are.  Perhaps it was done on accident, but maybe not.  Either way, I don't care.  We love this house and couldn't be more happy right now.  We don't move until the end of July, but it sure is nice to have something huge like this checked off the to-do-before-the-baby-comes list!

Here are a few shots of the house!  Unfortunately, the outside shot of the house is super-tiny!  I'll have to swing by soon and get a better one.

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