We did it!!! We bought our first home. For the past 12 years, Glenn and I have talked about the day that we would finally own a house that was ours. He always wanted a piece of land to raise animals and have a little farm, I have always pictured a place where I could knock a wall down and make it our own.

We started the home buying journey a little over 12 months ago. Living in a small community has its perks but the housing market right now is not one of them. Thankfully we had an excellent team of realtors and a lender who stuck with us throughout the year and never let us give up hope that we would end up in the perfect home. After going into escrow, then having it fall through (thank you Mr. Rain for showing us the leaky roof) and looking at several properties that always seemed to fall short of our wish list I started to lose hope that it was not meant to be but continued to stalk every listing that popped on the market hoping to find IT. We even decided to go ahead an plan a vacation because there was just no way we would be in escrow by fall (more on that later.)

So one Thursday afternoon I was working in the office and happened to check Zillow for no good reason, and I almost fell out of my chair when I read the listing and started flipping through the pictures. There is no way that it was as good as it looked. I sent it to Glenn and my Mom, who we had started joking about finding a house with a guest house for her and decided to do a drive by. Even though I couldn’t see the house from the road, it was in the perfect location and I just felt that this was it.

We went to see the house the next morning, had an offer in within a couple hours, and somehow had an accepted offer by Saturday afternoon. It was a dream come true until I started doing the math. You know how I said we decided to plan a vacation since we didn’t think the house was going to happen? Well… with a 45-day escrow it happened that we were packing our suitcases and the house at the same time. We literally closed escrow 4 days before heading out of the country on our European trip. So September of 2017 will go down in history as one of the best and most stressful months of our lives, and I would not change a single thing about it.

The bonus of this house is that it does have a guest house unit on the property and my mom was able to purchase the property with us so we won’t have just one house to remodel, but TWO and the girls get to have their Mema close by all the time.

We can not wait to make this house a home and watch the girls grow up in a place that is any child’s dream and I am thrilled to be able to share the whole process here. So here she is… our little piece of heaven.

BEFORE PICTURES

Here are some pictures of the house from the MLS listing. It has great bones, but is original 1950s throughout the house! Use your imagination 😉

DAY 1

Pretty much the second we got the keys we got to work taking things down and out of the house. While a part of me liked the shape of the bookshelf it fully blocked off the dining room and did not allow for the space to be open. We are pretty sure the people who built the house, built that bookcase, put it up, and then built the rest of the house around it. Talk about a tricky demolition.

BONUS FIND

We were super lucky and found the original quarter sawn oak under the horrid carpet in the hallway and both large bedrooms! It was actually in great shape and we have added refinish wood floors to our list of things to learn how to do. Oh hey, great photo bomb Diesel!