We're Finally Homeowners Again

125 days of living with my parents
118 days since closing on our little yellow house
112 days of waiting on our short sale

WE DID IT! We finally have a house again! Yesterday we closed on our dream home. Since then it's been a flurry of cleaning and moving (and we're nowhere near done!) But we are so grateful for our new house and ready to get settled into new routines! 

And I just want to take a second to say... if you feel the urge to take a photo, don't push that feeling away. Take the picture. If all you have is your cell phone, if your outfits clash worse than a tacky 80s party, if the sun is staring you straight in the face and you can barely see, take the picture.

If it's a special moment for your family, that's all that matters.

Waiting on Our Short Sale

Part One: Finding Our New House
Part Two: Waiting on Our Short Sale

We spent my birthday weekend stressed out by our decision to walk away from the Best of Both Worlds house, which we had imagined living in for nearly 6 weeks. We went to two open houses, sorted through the backlog of houses on MLS, and scheduled 2 showings with our realtor for Monday night.

And Monday night, we walked into our dream home. It was huge, something we could grow into for a long time, with plenty of space for a guest room and home office. It was renovated from top to bottom; roof, windows, AC unit included. It was in a central area of town, in a quiet neighborhood. And it had more closet space than I'd ever seen in a home. It was perfect. I couldn't stop smiling as we walked around.

But... it was a short sale. And it has taken FOREVER to close. Here's a quick timeline for you:

April 25 - Moved in with my parents

May 2 - Closed on #ourlittleyellowhouseinva

May 4-7 - Walked away from the Best of Both Worlds house. Found the Short Sale house and put in an offer.

While we were waiting to hear back from the bank, we continued to look at other houses. But everything brought us back to this house. It was the best, by far, of what we could afford. Over and over again, we decided that it was worth waiting for.

{Quick short sale explanation here: When we signed the contract on the short sale, that kicked off the bank's 2 month+ long process of getting the seller's paperwork together and evaluating the property. We could walk away at any time, but we were under contract so no one else could come in and outbid us unless we walked away first. Essentially, we weren't 100% sure that it was the house for us, but we wanted to see where it went.}

May 18 - We showed our parents the short sale house. Ryan's dad is in construction, so he knows what problem signs to look for. After walking through the house, he was happy with it and said the inspection shouldn't come back with any major repairs (which the bank was NOT going to help pay for).

May 25-August 1 - We received a variety of vague updates. The contract deadline passed with no answer. We extended the contract. That date passed with no answer. Multiple times we hear the words 'any day now' but nothing happens.

August 1 - We find out that the loan is set to be sold at the beginning of September. This deadline gets the bank motivated. 

August 14 - Approval (FINALLY) given. We have 14 days to close (or everything blows up in our faces.)

August 27 (today) - Closing

All communication through this process went from the bank, to the seller's lawyer, to the seller's agent, to our agent, to us, so there was a significant lag time on all responses.

As you can imagine, we've been on an emotional roller-coaster. We have had ZERO control in this entire process. Our two options were wait or walk away. There was nothing we could do to speed things up or make the process easier. This is certainly not the way I would have wanted to buy our second home, but look at all the blessings that came with this crazy process:

-We figured out what we really wanted in a house. The Geometric Doorway House only had 1 downstairs closet and very little storage in the laundry room. We decided not to submit an offer on a house we liked because there was no shade in the backyard and we saw it on a hot summer day.

-We changed our minds on our preferred neighborhood. All three of the previous houses were in the south edges of Great Bridge, which meant a great school district and convenient shopping, but more driving time to a lot of places we'd still be going. Our new house is still in Chesapeake but much closer to the Virginia Beach line.

-We could not put in an offer on a short sale until we had sold our home. But we are not risk takers, so we would have never sold our house unless we thought we had another house lined up. God brought us each of these houses to walk us through the house listing and closing process, so that we would be ready when the Short Sale House's price was reduced.

-We sold our house without the stress of constantly touring possible homes. The week we were moving out, we could focus completely on saying goodbye to our little yellow house without worrying that we'd be living with my parents forever. 

-Darcy has been able to kiss his grandparents goodnight for the last 100+ days. And we've had the opportunity to go out on a few extra date nights since we've had a built-in babysitter.

- We've been mortgage free for 4 months. We've had a break from most of the responsibilities that come with maintaining a home.

-Most importantly, we learned (and will continue learning) that we do not direct the path of our lives. God does. And God's primary concern for our lives is not efficiency. He orchestrated this process of waiting for us so that we could grow and be more like him. So that I would fight my anxiety and frustration in waiting with truth about his faithfulness.

One more thing... my word of the year is SEASON. I chose this word for 2018 in December while working through my powersheets. My intention for that word was to embrace the changes that would occur in both my business and personal life throughout the year as Darcy grew. I love routines and having a baby means changing your entire routine every 3-4 months if not more often. God had SO MUCH MORE planned!

Photo of our new house to come soon!!! We're closing today!

Finding Our New House

I haven't said a lot about our home searching process over the last 4 months (FOUR MONTHS!!!), because I felt like everything was changing so quickly that I could hardly keep our friends and family caught up from day to day. I was constantly asking people what they last heard so I had a frame of reference for what to share with them.

So... last you guys heard, we said goodbye to our little yellow house. We sold our house faster than we could have hoped. We knew it would show well, because we put a LOT of work into it over the 4.5 years we lived there. But the neighborhood streets are pretty tight with lots of cars and our master closet and bathroom were both pretty small. But we had 10 showings over 3 days and a full price offer after 24 hours on the market. It couldn't have been a smoother process.

And I clung to that. Because it was CLEAR that God wanted us to move.

It was just very unclear where he wanted us to live.

Apparently, this is a terrible year to try to buy a house. The market (for the most part) is full of over-priced un-renovated houses. It took us at least 23 showings and 8 open houses to find our house. (Although I'm pretty sure I'm missing some here!)

But let me start at the beginning...

We put our house on the market after we found one we wanted to purchase. We'll call this one the Geometric Doorway House. It had tall ceilings, tons of natural light, new carpet, freshly painted gray walls, and a gigantic backyard. It seemed perfect. It had been sitting on the market for nearly 4 months and all of a sudden, the weekend we listed our house and put in our offer, someone else outbid us.

Our roller-coaster high of selling our home so quickly became an anxious low of a looming closing date and no house to purchase. A few days later, another house was listed that seemed perfect for us. We'll call this one the Big Kitchen House. There was tons of gorgeous counter space, although we'd want to paint the kitchen cabinets white. The house had been nicely updated, and it had lots of closet space.

Looking back, the Big Kitchen House was definitely not the house for us. The FROG (4th bedroom) was small and we would have had to take down an above ground pool that was taking up too much of the yard. But it was in a great part of town, it had a beautiful kitchen with tons of pantry storage, and we had a move-out date quickly approaching.

So we put in an offer over Easter weekend. They countered. Included in the counter-offer was an extended closing date, 3 weeks after we were supposed to be out of our house. It was a lot to think through. We asked my parents if we could stay with them for a bit. We researched PODs. We were preparing our response. And then suddenly, Monday morning, we were informed that they accepted another offer.

And so yet again, we were without a place to move and we had to leave our little yellow house in just a few weeks.

Then another house came on the market. Let's call it the Best of Both Worlds House. It had a beautiful open floor plan, tall ceilings, fresh gray paint, tons of closet space, a 5th bedroom, and a gigantic backyard. As soon as the listing was posted, we were knocking down their door (figuratively) to see it. I was about to go out of town for the weekend and I didn't want anyone else to beat us to this house. We toured the house quickly the morning I left town and put in an offer right away. Unfortunately, our eagerness might have given the sellers the impression that their house was highly desirable, because they were unreasonable in every step of negotiations. The Best of Both Worlds house was beautiful, but it still had the original roof, windows, and AC unit, all of which would very soon need to be replaced. And they wanted to wait 10 weeks to close. (10 WEEKS!!!) We managed to negotiate the contract, and then the inspection, and then we hit the breaking point. The appraisal came back $10,000 lower than the price we had agreed upon, and we weren't able to reach a solution.

We decided to walk away from the house.

By this time we had been living with my parents for almost 2 weeks of what we thought would be an 8 week stay. Most of our belongings were sitting in a driveway in a POD. Now we had nowhere to move. And we wouldn't be getting our money back for the inspection or appraisal.

It was back to the beginning. We'd been under contract for almost 4 weeks. We'd stopped looking at other houses and had no idea what was on the market.

To be continued...

Leaving Our Little Yellow House

If you follow along on Instagram, you've likely seen the news that we're selling #ourlittleyellowhouseinva. We wanted to move sometime this year, and everything accelerated so quickly. I'd forgotten how much house hunting consumes your entire schedule! We finished up our house projects, listed our house at the end of March, and it sold in 24 hours. And this Friday, we hand over the keys.

We've changed so much about the house that we never shared, so I wanted to give you a little tour.

We took off the shutters and the storm door, painted the trim white, and installed taller and wider windows. And in the backyard, we moved the shed and built a deck. I also think it's funny to see how ginormous our Bradford Pear tree was and how much the evergreen tree grew over the last 4.5 years! It was so tiny when we moved in that we almost dug it up!

The living room went through more stages than any of the other rooms. It started out peach. We painted it gray, put down laminate floors (and then tile floors after our hot water heater broke), and moved the TV three times! 

Our dining area changed a bit too. We moved the china hutch in and out of the room a couple times. It's our favorite piece of furniture but it really crowded that area!

And for fun... I wanted to include some of our listing photos so you can see our house in an unrealistic not-very-lived-in condition. Look how empty our downstairs is! It felt like I removed half of the room before we took pictures!

Oh the kitchen! I blocked the original kitchen with it's sticky cabinets and broken appliances from my mind as soon as we ripped it out! It was one of our first projects, and I'm going to miss all that pretty granite when we move!

Please take a moment to appreciate the sink and pedestal that don't go together, the horrible light/mirror/medicine cabinet combo, and the wooden outlet covers! The bathrooms are unrecognizable, even though we only replaced one of the toilets.

When we moved in, our master bedroom was yellow, had no overhead lighting, and an off-center front window. We painted the walls blue, added a ceiling fan, and expanded the window to a double. Then we build a bed frame, upholstered a headboard, and bought white bedding (which is usually covered in cat hair!)

Darcy's room started out as a junk room when we first moved in, so there aren't really great before and afters to share, but the two left images are how we had the room before Darcy was born, then how it looked last fall, and the bottom right is how I staged it. Very neutral and almost completely free of toys. Because that's real life with a toddler. ;-)

The office has also changed quite a bit. Originally, I had meetings at the house, so we had one of our couches upstairs. Then we put our guest bed in there for a little while, before we moved some things around and needed the space to store other things.

We put a lot of 'sweat equity' into this house and we're excited to have a good down payment for our new home. But it's bittersweet to leave this house. While it's not the first place we lived together, it's the first home we purchased and the first place we were able to really personalize. This is where I built my wedding business. We found our cat in the driveway of this house. We taught friends to make sushi in the kitchen. We brought Darcy home from the hospital to the sweet little room we prepared for him. My mom sat in the living room, holding her grandson every morning so I could sleep. We celebrated Granddad's last Christmas in this house. Darcy took his first steps in the hallway. We hung a swing for Darcy from the tree and watched ducks and geese in the creek together.

Our new house will have a lot of beautiful memories too. Hopefully even more than the 4 1/2 years worth we've had here. We love you, little yellow house!