Home Sweet Home

It has finally happened! We found a house! We will now be writing checks toward owning something instead of mailing checks to someone for rent. I learned that house hunting is not near as much fun or exciting as I had imagined. It's stressful and can be kind of depressing. Schools ruled the search for us, and not just school districts but specific elementary schools. So of the elementary schools that met the criteria, we then ruled out based on location. A quick drive for Daniel to work and being close to things we do and love were a top priority for us. I learned from the last town we lived in that not having to drive 30 plus minutes to get to the stores, shops, and restaurants we love is worth something.

Having 4 bedrooms was our other non-negotiable priority. We knew we wanted to be in whatever house we bought for more than just a few years. We want to build equity and quite honestly we are tired of moving. (We've lived in 6 places, in 3 different states, in the last 5 years and moving gets cray-cray when you have little humans who can't pack and load all their own stuff ...and they seem to have the most stuff.). We know we'd like to have another munchkin and don't want to outgrow our space a few years after we move in.

Finding neighborhoods with all three of these criteria was the easy part. Finding a house in these neighborhoods in our budget was waaaaayyy harder than I had imagined. Everything I liked was just a little out of our price comfort zone and the last thing I want to do is be house poor. It was so tempting to look at the houses that were just above the price we'd decided on... and we did, but it always came back to wanting to be able to pay all the bills and still have some cash to save and do a few fun things too. After a few months of looking at every house in our range (and a few out of our range) we finally found it and it's a perfect fit for us! We compromised on the size of my kitchen so I'll be scouring pinterest for lots of good kitchen storage ideas.

We are doing lots of work to the house so I'll be posting before and after pics as the projects get finished  as well as some of the lessons we are learning!