It’s Time To Talk About The New House

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a while now. Not because I was dreading it, because I have so much to say and barely know where to begin.

In November, we sold our first house (of 3.5 years) and moved into our forever home. We spent the entire time renovating it, room by room. We started by painting the entire place ourselves then moved onto meatier projects, like renovating our kitchen. We truly enjoyed the process of fixing up our first place, but honestly came to the end of the project. We fixed up everything we possibly could, while not pricing ourselves out of the neighborhood we were in. The changes we made were worth it for us to enjoy while we were still living there, but also made for a sound investment when it came time to sell.

Our hunt for our second house started last spring. We weren’t looking to move, rather for a place to fix up and flip. This would mean that we’d have two mortgages until the second property sold. We found a gorgeous (but poorly cared for) 4,500 square foot Victorian that was beaming with potential. As we started crunching our numbers, we realized that we were about two years away from being able to take on a second property of this size. We quickly came to the conclusion that, if we did this NOW, we’d need to live in flip and not just have it as a side project. We decided, however, that if we were to move, we were never going to move again. So, our focus shifted. We were still itching to take on another project; we just needed to find one we’d want to live in forever. For many reasons (bad schools, small yard, expensive sewer issues, etc.), The Victorian wasn’t it.

I’ll skip passed the part where we saw a bunch of beautiful houses that didn’t work out for one reason or another – and tell you that we found the one we bought while searching on Zillow late one night. Alex was actually out of town for work and I sent him a link, claiming that I found our forever home. It checked ALL of the boxes – and was under our budget. Considering that our wish list was insanely long (and somewhat unreasonable), we knew this gem was rare. We scheduled a date to see it with our realtor on the following morning and put in an offer right away. With a bit of back and fourth, the home became ours within a few days. As luck would have it, our home sold on the same day – actually, within the same hour. It was really hard to say goodbye to our first place, but we were overflowing with excitement for this next step. 

I’ll be sharing more on the project specifics as we get into the nitty gritty. I have every single space designed (in my head) and I’m eager to get those thoughts into posts. At this point, our projects haven’t been the most interesting to document. We got a new roof. We converted our heat from oil to natural gas. We’ve started by crossing off the “needs” items from our list, before diving into the fun projects we just want to tackle. Alex has made plenty of progress on the master bedroom, which I’ve shown lots on Instagram. Once the renovations are completed in there, he will move onto refinishing the floors. Then, we will bring painters in to paint and wallpaper (lots, duh) the entire place. Our old home, which was 2000 square feet, was a much more manageable amount of wall space for us to cover ourselves. Our new home is 3500 square feet, so we’re calling in the troops!

I’m SO SO excited to document more of this space. Stay tuned to follow along as we rip out walls and pull down ceilings!