Yep, it’s true! We’re packing up and moving BEFORE Christmas!?!?! What? I know, it sounds crazy, but let me explain…
First, the basics. We’re not leaving Alabama or even our little community. I don’t see us moving away from here, probably ever. So we bought a house around the corner. We still have the same jobs, go to the same school, use the same pool and even belong to the same HOA. Literally, one turn and you’re at our new house. They even pick up our trash on the same day.
The House That Built This Blog: Some Back Story
If you don’t know our story yet, or how we ended up in our current home, let me catch you up real quick. This house we live in right now is actually the reason I started my blog. Seven and a half years ago (early 2012), the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession, and the housing market was down.
We had a 1-year-old at the time, and we were looking ahead and trying to get into a better neighborhood for raising kids, with good public schools. We couldn’t afford much in the neighborhood we wanted, so we had planned to build in a less expensive one.
But then I kept watching one house drop its price by $10,000 every single week! I decided I had to go see what all the fuss was about. Turns out it was a foreclosure, but one that had been left mostly intact, with fresh (beige) paint and new (beige) carpet.
It wasn’t anything super special, but it was cheaper than what we could build and bigger than the house we were living in. AND it was in one of the best neighborhoods with the best amenities. We never dreamed we’d be able to afford this particular neighborhood.
We ended up buying this house before we sold our old one. I wouldn’t recommend that because of the stress, but it worked out, and we sold our previous home at the perfect time.
I started this blog the week we closed on this house to document how we were going to update this “builder beige” foreclosure. Little did I know it would become my job while I worked from home and raised our daughters.
This house has been so good to us over the past 7.5 years. We love so much about it: the lot, the neighbors, the views, the high ceilings, the schools, the neighborhood pool and gym, and more. It was also a huge upgrade from our previous home, with two extra bedrooms, a proper dining room and a real laundry room.
But the house itself? It wasn’t exactly the house of my dreams. I didn’t pick it for the house itself… I picked it as a way into our dream neighborhood. And I used it as content for this blog, which has turned into one of the biggest, unexpected blessings of my life.
Dreaming of Something More…
But as we added a kid and my business grew, I really wished we had a bonus/play room and a dedicated office space. I never quite mastered the guest room/office combo, simply because my job requires so much decor.
Over the past year I haven’t even had a guest bedroom, and I’ve used the fourth bedroom solely as my office. I really wanted to be able to have guests stay with us again. (Right now, when we have guests, we move our youngest out of her room and into her sister’s room, which is totally fine. But it would be nice to have a dedicated guest bedroom.)
We also wanted an extra bathroom and a powder room for guests. In our current home, the guest bathroom is also the girls’ bathroom, and it inevitably has toothpaste all over the sink 360 days out of the year.
So I’ve been watching the market for years. Does anybody else do that?!
We knew we wanted to stay in our neighborhood so the girls could keep the same school, we’d still have our pool in the summers, and my husband would still be 15 minutes from work.
How We Knew It Was Time to Move
I’d never seen the “perfect” house come on the market until a few months ago, when I saw it! It was THE perfect house. My husband was veeerrry hesitant. If it were up to him, we’d never move and would stay in our house forever. Ha!
I convinced him to take a look and just take it one step at a time, so that if it was meant to be, it would be. It had everything I was looking for in a house and checked off almost all of my “want in a house” boxes, except for the small backyard. But it had a large front yard and sat on a cul-de-sac.
We put in an offer, and we ended up getting outbid … Womp. Womp.
But going through that process helped us see what we could afford and what we would need to do to get our house ready to sell.
It’s a hot real estate market, as you probably already know, and homes like ours are selling in 24-48 hours! What even is life?? We were shocked at how much our home was worth, and even more at how low interest rates were, and that we might only have to list our house for a couple of days.
I think I’ll wrap it up here for today and share more next week, since this is already creeping up on 1,000 words.
More Posts You’ll Love:
