Home Sweet Home

Buying a home ain’t no simple thing. Most days I’m still reeling a bit that this place is actually ours. I mean, aren’t we mere 20 year old love birds just graduating from college? Oh, no, that’s right, we’re turning 27 this year and have added two bambinos to our clan! Awhile back I mentioned writing a post about why we waited five years to buy a house, and I’m still planning on doing that, but today, I thought I’d delve into why we went with a newly built home instead of a vintage charmer and the whole process of buying our first home.

So, to start off, I think most people would pin Dominic and I as the perfect couple to buy a fixer upper. Dom is super handy and I’m resourceful in a prairie kind of way. But when it comes down to our every day life, we always knew we wanted our home to be our sanctuary, our quiet, peaceful place. To be that for us, we knew we wanted a newly built home. 

Rather than have a remodeling to-do list, we wanted to craft a want-to-do list to personalize our new home. Especially with two little ones under foot, we knew we couldn’t survive any huge overhauls. It just isn’t in the cards for our personalities and patience levels. And yes, feel free to read that as we chose to buy a new home to save our marriage, because, in fact, an older home could have really tested our ability to love through thick and thin. In the eight weeks we’ve been here we’ve accomplished two fun projects (our Annie Sloan dresser re-do for the breakfast nook and garage storage shelves) and we have a Pinterest-inspired list of future endeavors too.

Now, how did this whole thing begin …

Our search for a home started many moons ago – like, over a year ago when we placed on offer on a little lot of forest in a quaint neighborhood. We planned to build there and I even had my maternity pictures with Max taken there. Then the county got involved and we’ve been at a stand still ever since. Thanksyouverymuchforbeingsodifficult. In December, after six months of living with my parents we decided it was time to make a move since the county wasn’t planning to budge. This whole county thing is a really long and boring story which is why I’m not going into detail. We contacted our realtor, whom we love, and started checking out listings. We apologized numerous times for being so picky – I wanted white trim, Dominic wanted a shop, I wanted a master bath tub and space for a fenced yard. And on and on the list went. We threw up our arms in early January and trusted that the Lord would bring us the perfect place. A week or so later, Cheryl called with a newly built home that had just dropped into our price range. We viewed it that morning, fell in love, scheduled a second tour so family could take a peek and began working on our financing. 

With the guidance of our realtor and the graciousness of our credit union and builder we arranged for closing and all the pieces fell into place. In mid-February we got our keys and just like that, we became homeowners!