When we first moved back to Virginia our plan was to stay with my parents only for a couple of months. Tommi would start the academy in January, we would save for a couple of months, and be off.
Well Tommi's clearance took extra long to go through and he didn't get the job until July. But we weren't complaining because Tommi officially got the job, but it just pushed house hunting back by 6 months.
When we lived in Utah we rented and for some reason that was the only thought we had for Virginia; renting. But when we started looking in July we saw that "great deals" were 1,000 a month for a two bedroom apartment. So pretty much out of the two paychecks Tommi gets a month almost an entire one would go towards just rent alone and if we ever wanted more than two kids tough luck. I became pretty frantic because we were already living at my parents 6 months longer than planned.
Suddenly my mom suggested buying.
The only people I knew that owned a house were much older couples that were done having children. Not young married couples that are still expanding. I thought it would be more expensive, that we didn't have enough credit, that there was some big reason we young couples don't typically own.
Found out there really isn't a reason.
One Sunday Tommi and I drove around putting Iris to sleep and found a gooooooorgeous house for sale. Out of curiosity, I wrote down the address and called the Realtor. I told her my entire situation: That I have no idea if I even can buy, what our price range is, whatever. She was so sweet and said that people like me are her favorite clients to deal with and forwarded me to her loan agent to figure out what we could afford. Found out right away we could in NO way afford the beautiful house we saw. My heart broke a little bit. It had high ceilings, 4 bedrooms, finished basement, master jacuzzi, and only 5 minutes from my parents. Good thing I didn't ask for a tour before I knew our price range cause it would have just hurt more.
So that one was off the list but our realtor found a huge list of houses that fit and we started house hunting that following Saturday. Just that easy.
We quickly found out that though this woman was a very sweet, honest lady she was showing houses to us that were always at the very highest of our price range, and cared more about location and status.
One night I was going through houses that were a little further away than we were looking for but were cheaper and I happened upon an awesome lake house with 11+ acres.
This one even Tommi got super excited. The top picture is the back of the house and the place in the center where there's nothing but windows is a huge sun room and to the left with the huge window is an entire wall of the master bedroom. and that bottom picture is the view from the master bedroom window. It was BEAUTIFUL. We even showed the pictures to both of our families. We could go fishing in our own lake, shoot in our own backyard, and have complete privacy. We were really set on this house.
Until we really thought about it. My paranoid mom kicked in and thinking about a Tommi jr living with a lake in the backyard made my head spin. I didn't want to have to constantly worry about where the kids are. Tommi's paranoia kicked in too and said if anything ever happened to us on 11 acres we wouldn't exactly be able to get help too easily. Tommi also pointed out that the .5 mile driveway would not work if we got snowed it. You can't exactly call out of work saying, "Sorry can't make it today my driveway is full of snow and I can't shovel all of it" when you're a police officer. Then we thought about all the repairs that would need to be done.
We told our thoughts to our realtor and she said, "If you're having second thoughts about it now and you haven't even signed any contracts my professional advice is to drop it."
siiiiiigh so that one was gone too. We decided it would be a pretty awesome place to visit but not to live in.
So we started over again and I found a pretty generic home BUT it had a SAUNA in the master bathroom.
Now this house hunting was completely me doing it. I'd look the places up, tell them to Tommi and he'd said sure let's check it out. But never really seemed excited about any of them. This one, got him to stop playing Call of Duty. I knew I did good.
Later on that week our car had another problem and I told Tommi if it had another problem that year we could get a new one. So we now had a car payment which we didn't have before that I had to fit into the budget. This made me really divide the budget up a lot more than I had before, and we realized all the houses we had been looking at were not really in our price range at all. In fact like a $80,000 difference.
I told Tommi, it's best we don't even look at the sauna house cause it'll just hurt more.
We told our realtor our news and what our new price range was. She responded with understanding but frustratingly when she sent me new links they were the price range of what I would have been liking to look at before and now we were starting to think she was not the sweetest anymore.
One night I came to the thought of a townhome. It's much more than an apartment but in our price range of a house. I started looking and quickly found that for the most part the townhomes in this areas were sort of in not the best areas of town.
Until I found one that was in a great area, three stories, and only 10 minutes from my parents. Instead of calling the realtor we had be using I called the realtor selling the place. She couldn't show it to me because she was selling the place and that means she could show being bias but she forwarded me to one that could show me.
We saw the house the following day and it was with a minivan mom as our new realtor. Which somehow comforted me. We got to talking and her husband is also a realtor and had just retired from being a police officer in the same county Tommi will be starting in soon. Fate?
We went inside and it was great. We loved the realtor, it was in our comfortable price range, we felt safe in the neighborhood (We drove around at both morning and night), and just had an all around good feeling about it. We told the realtor we love it but want a couple of days to decide to which she responded with, "Pray about it. If you have a good feeling about it, go with it. You can never go wrong with a feeling during prayer."
Woman I love you. It's nice to hear that from someone outside of my religion.
So we did pray. And we felt great still. We signed the contract, got a home inspection, didn't have to put a single dollar down, got an amazing interest rate, and had tons of help on our moving weekend.
So from July to the end of November was our house hunting experience. We looked at no exaggeration 50+ homes personally and I looked at 1,000+ homes in all the surrounding counties on the internet. The experience was full of hope, disappointment, arguments, excitement and veerrrry tedious paperwork.
It's not a glorious home with acres, or a sauna but it's OUR home. And for literally half the price of what we would have done renting. The only changes we need to do are cosmetic and can happen whenever. Tommi has the basement all to himself with his at home gym and he did a great job putting it together. I love how it's coming together and it's already had a few guests stay in it. And will later in about a month too. I love having my own home and being able to invite company over in it. And I can't wait to do all the fun things I have planned for it :D
Many more pictures to come:
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