I kind of eluded to the fact that we’ve been working on something for awhile a couple of weeks ago but I wasn’t really to share yet.

Now, that everything is signed, completed, sealed, etc, I feel comfortable saying that….

DEVON AND I BOUGHT A HOUSE!

BUT…not just any house. We bought OUR house. Like…the house we’ve lived in for two years. So, not only are we now homeowners, but we don’t even have to move!

Confused? If you’re new here, that’s understandable, so let me explain.

When Devon and I first moved in together, we rented a “decent” 2 bedroom apartment that we lived in 5 years before we decided we needed something bigger, with a lot less neighbors and noise than we were dealing with in our apartment.

At that point, we weren’t really ready to buy a house yet, but we knew we wanted the space, so we looked at renting a house. That’s when we found our house for rent through a local real estate agent. We put in an application and wound up being lucky enough to be the first people approved to move in.

We signed a lease without ever seeing the house in person. I know that sounds crazy, but we had been let down by a few other houses before we found this one, so when we saw the photos online, it looked so perfect that we just applied without going to a showing. The most impulsive thing I’ve ever done worked out even better than I ever thought it could and we have been happily living here ever since.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, around the middle of May, when our management company let us know that the owners wanted to sell the house once our lease was up in August. We were absolutely devastated. We had every intention on continuing to live here, at least for a few more years, while we figured out where we wanted to permanently set down roots and buy a home.

Plus, selfishly…moving in August is hell.

So, I went to Devon after thinking about it for a minute and said that I wanted us to buy this house. He literally asked zero questions and just said, “okay”. So quickly that I was actually taken aback by it and questioned it.

He said, “you’re not someone who wants a lot, so when you tell me that there is something I’m going to make sure you get it”.

It’s like the most husbandly thing he’s ever said. I teared.

Once we decided to see how this would work, if it was even feasible for us, we decided to talk to my assistant principal who is also a realtor, who I felt would be more honest with us and less salesman-like than a lot of realtors can be. He talked us through the process and we let him run some numbers to see if it was feasible because, like I said, we trusted him to be honest with us.

And he was. Even though it was a little sooner than we were planning for, he helped us make a plan so it could work with what we were able to do financially. We wound up asking him to put together an offer based on the information he gave us and he presented it to the owners a week or so later.

We did wind up going back and forth with the owners for a minute because they had an idea in their head of a number that they wanted from the sale, but we wound up finding a fair middle-ground that everyone could be happy with, so they accepted and we went under-contract and entered more paperwork and signatures than I would have ever thought were possible.

I swear in the 45-ish minutes that we were with the sellers/agents/settlement lawyer/etc we signed our name at least 60 times. Luckily they don’t hold it against you if your signature looks different each time you sign because if they did, we would be in trouble.

It’s so crazy to think that we’re now homeowners. I know it’s something we were always working toward, but working toward it and being one is so different.

I actually sat in my living room on Friday just in awe that I own the place I was sitting in; not just the things in it, but the house itself. My family never owned a house when I was growing up; we always lived in apartments.

That’s not true…we did own one house for about a year before it was foreclosed on, but that doesn’t really count.

Growing up, my parents were horrible with money (in case you couldn’t tell); they never lived within their means, they were always so obsessed with having “things” rather than a house, going on vacations, etc. And both sets of my grandparents did rather well for themselves, so it’s not like this was a generational issue – it was a my parents issue (and I don’t/didn’t have good relationships with either of my parents, so I’m not going to pretend like I do). It was an issue that has always left me overly cautious in decisions like buying a house because I never wanted to end up in the position that they did the one time they bought a home.

I had a mini heart attack when I looked at our loan amount because I have never owed that much money to anyone for any reason and it’s a little daunting to think about. But as my assistant principal/realtor keeps trying to drill into my head; it’s an investment that, as long as we maintain and upgrade it, will pay off exponentially when we’re ready to move on. We’re never going to live here for the entirety of our 30 year mortgage (the middle and high school in our area is terrible, so our plan is to move by the time our eventual children are middle school aged), so it’s not like we’re going to pay the entirety of the loan, ever – which is oddly calming for me.

Despite that, I am very excited that we get to stay in our home and it is OUR home now in every way possible. We are making plans to renovate or re-do parts of the house as we are able to do so. We’re just going to kind of go room-by-room and do things like paint, remove window coverings/blinds that we hate, change out light fixtures, and just make it more “us” than we were able to before. We’re going to do it slowly. There are a couple of things that we need to do that are a bit more necessary so we’re going to take care of that stuff first. But we’re making plans for what we want to do once that is handled.

So, welcome to our new adventure of home ownership! I have no idea what I’m doing, but hopefully it’s a relatively smooth process.

If you have any sage wisdom/advice on home ownership, I’m open to it. Feel free to leave it in a comment or DM me!