For the last 2 years or so, we had been talking vaguely of moving "soon". Soon being defined as "as soon as we could actually pull it off", which could have been 2-5 years or more.

You see, the neighborhood we moved into in 2003 had started going way downhill fast. 1/3 or so of the houses on the street were rentals, and it seemed the owners weren't keeping tabs on the renters. The street looked bad and there were quite a few "shady" type people around. Even old residents of the neighborhood (some that had been there since it was built in 1956) were saying the same thing. We only paid $85,000 for our house thankfully, so the plan was to sell it and move out before the values went way too far down.

But then a miracle happened. Seemingly overnight, everything reversed. The houses that were being rented sold to actual homeowners who moved in and cleaned the places up. The block looks great now. It's back to a nice quiet family neighborhood.

So we're planning to stay. We've got quite a lot of things we want to get done to the house now, though. Heh. We still have to solve whatever issue makes our bedroom noticeably colder than the rest of the house. We've got a hall light in the old half of the house that doesn't work, so will probably have to involve an electrician there. We certainly need to paint almost every room.

But, the payments are super low (well, it's an $85,000 house at a really good FIXED interest rate, so of course they're low...) and the values are slowly going up.