We Bought a New House!

I am so excited to finally share that we are moving! We actually have known this since May, but held off on sharing because I was feeling a little superstitious. I wanted to wait until after closing and we had the keys in our hand before we decided to tell anyone. In this crazy market, you just can’t be too sure! Well, we closed last week and now it is official! JD and I are *hoping* that this next home is the one our family grows into for years to come.

You may be curious as to why I wanted to dedicate a full blog post to this news. I want this to serve as sort of a journal entry of the story as to how we happened upon this home. The story is pretty serendipitous. JD and I have had our fingers on the pulse of the real estate market for a while now. You may remember last summer we actually were ready to sell our home, took photos and everything, but then I found out I was pregnant and it didn’t seem like the right time. Since then, we actually decided to shift our focus to our current home, and we saved up money to do a few big renovations that would make our home more functional for our family. Unfortunately, due to the increasing costs of materials, and back ordered supplies, we were unable to see these projects through. We had SO MANY conversations about what we should do, wait to renovate until next year, build a home, sell our home, etc. Eventually, we decided to stay in our home and just take it one day at a time. No expectations means we can’t get let down, right?

The weekend before Mother’s Day I was feeling pretty down about our current home situation. Now, before anyone says anything I am FULLY aware that these are first world problems, and we were never ungrateful for what we have. However, to me our current house never *felt* like home. I can’t really explain why, but I think it partially is due to the fact that we only planned on living here for around 5 years. I shared my frustrations with JD and he randomly pulled up real estate listings and the first house he saw had basically everything we were looking for AND it was in our price range. He asked me if I wanted to go look at it, and I thought he was crazy because we didn’t even have an active pre approval or real estate agent. I said sure, thinking he would drop it, and he ended up calling a bank and a real estate agent. A couple hours later we were touring the home. It happened SO FAST.

Of course, we ended up loving it. We put an offer in right away, using the cash we saved for home renovations, and hoped for the best. Given that we weren’t actively looking, we figured we had nothing to lose and if our offer wasn’t accepted we weren’t going to get too broken up about it. If you have been house hunting this past year, you know the market is super competitive, and we weren’t really in a position to get in a bidding war. Our real estate agent called us and said someone else put in a higher offer, and asked if we wanted to compete with it. After discussing it, we agreed to keep our offer as is with the understanding that we probably wouldn’t get the home.

The next day, we didn’t hear from them so we assumed the home had gone under contract. It was no big deal, we were fine with that and basically carried on with life. Then, we got a call that the highest offer fell through and the sellers wanted to know if we were still interested. WHAT?! We were so shocked. We went from not even looking at real estate, to putting in an offer, and getting under contact in the matter of 24 hours. We didn’t even tell our families! The whole thing was such a whirlwind, but we felt all the signs were leading us here and we had to do it.

Our new home is not perfect, but it has so much potential. It truly feels like *home* for us and we are so excited for all the memories that will be made in our new space.