Immigration news and we have found a beautiful home

Well it’s been over 5 months since Beth and I arrived here in the USA (Steve followed 12 days later) and things have progressed quicker then we anticipated. We filed our residency papers through an excellent lawyer that we found in Orem in mid January. There are 3 things that we filed for - travel documents should we need to go back to the UK before we get our residency (only to be used in an emergency), employment cards and our actual residency.

We got our appointment for our bio-metrics (fingerprints etc) within 2 weeks. In spite of me having to have mine done twice on Saturday 13th March we received our travel documents (which usually takes 90 days to arrive after filing), our employment cards (which take about 3-5 months) and our residency appointment (6-9 months) for the 13th April. We understand that we will be told at the appointment if we are successful and our cards will follow within a couple of weeks). We are very excited that it’s looking very much like we will have our residency by the end of April.

We look convicts on our employment cards!!!!

In January we started to look for a house to rent and until we found our home 2 weeks ago we had seen probably 40+ houses some twice. Within 2 weeks of our search we found a house that we really liked that was just 4 minutes from Beth’s school and we decided on our second visit that we wanted it. We signed a one year lease contract and gave a deposit and agreed to move in on the 15th April. Some 3 weeks later we received a call from the owner of the house to say they couldn’t go through with our lease for personal reasons (we did get our deposit back). So we were back to looking at houses, but strangely enough I had kept having the thought that this very thing would happen so wasn’t totally surprised.

We took a good couple of weeks before we found our home, coming close to agreeing on couple of other houses, but we never felt totally like this is the right house since the first one fell through. We found it very exhausting and time consuming often trying to convince ourselves that a certain house was right. We even submitted applications for 2 homes, one couple back tracked on what they agreed and the other never got back to us within the 2 days that he said he would in spite of leading us to believe that he really liked us (come to think about we still haven't heard from him). But this meant we kept looking and eventually found a beautiful home (considerably bigger, nicer and a better deal then the first home) that we love so much that we have signed a lease to buy contract. All the disappointments allowed us to decide what we really wanted in home and we found it!

We think we will moving in sometime in the later part of April, the uncertainty is due because we don’t know when our belongings will actually arrive from England. Our things that have been stored in Birmingham since the end of October last year were moved last Friday from the storage container to a shipping container and will be on water making its way to Long Beach California by the weekend with an estimated arrival of April the 18th, but they it has to clear customs which can take 2+ days (we are hoping no more then 3 as we get charged a daily rate after that). After it will then head up to Utah by rail and road and delivered to our door. Thanks to Kelvin, and friend (sorry don't know his name), William, Aaron, Graham and Steve for moving our things, Steve found it really hard not being able to be there and help himself. Luckily we can move in any time after the end of this month and we hope we get a few days notice before it arrives so we can get help with unloading. We are excited to get our things it will be like Christmas come early.