So... We Bought A House!

Photography by: Authentic Grace Photography

It’s been a little less than a month since we closed on our new home and it is still surreal to wake up there. It honestly feels like we are at an Airbnb on “vacations” and we will head back to the apartment soon... haha!

If you are caught off guard about this news, well you are not the only one. I was very caught off guard by all this, it all happened so fast and SO out of the blue! Don’t get me wrong, my husband and I had talked about buying a house and was in our plans at some point…. Like 2-3 years down the road… but I guess the God and the universe had another plan for us!

So, here is how it went down….

About a year and a half ago my husband and I were talking about a getting a house, but neither of us had ever owned one or had ever been close to know what the process was. On top of everything being in a new city and a new market we were completely blind. So, we started to ask around met with a few realtors who explained to us the market and a very high-level overview of the process.

Mind you this was early spring of 2018 and real estate market in the Spring in Twin Cities is INSANE! And by insane, I mean; will-forfeit-inspection type of insane. We immediately got cold feet and backed up from all of it. We decided to wait a few months… or years… we were not really in a rush to buy something. We did however book an appointment with a financial advisor, who gave us a bit more perspective on what steps we needed to take to be 100% stable when we decided to buy. He told us a couple of easy things we could tweak to get to a better place than where we were back then.

Now looking back, I am so glad he over exaggerated about the down payment and extra money we needed to have because we were able to save a lot in a matter of a year and a half in order to hit that goal. To do that, we stayed at our apartment for 15 more months.

Cut to September of this 2019…

I started looking into our lease to make sure we didn’t miss the date to renew our lease. By early October my hubby and I decided that we wanted to stay another year at our apartment. We had put a lot of work into it and we loved the space. But life had other plans for us… on Halloween we got an email from the management office saying that some of the units in our building were taken over by corporate housing and our apartment was one of them. I’m not gonna lie I was pretty upset because our minds were already made up to stay.

As we started to think about our options and after looking at a similar apartment in our building and realizing that the price was not really worth it, my husband suggested for us to talk to Vanessa. She used to be our neighbor at our first apartment and now she is a realtor. In Miami realtors also deal with rentals so we figured why not ask her? We met up for a beer and she mentioned to us that actually, winter was a very good time to buy and that interest was pretty low at the time. Honestly in my mind and based on what the financial advisor told us I thought we needed $25k cash to buy a house to include down payment and all the extra costs and I said “pfff no way, we don’t have that money” (mainly because of Milo’s illness on 2018) but Vanessa was super helpful to help us understand our options and see a more realistic picture.

I was hesitant because to be honest I am not impressed by the architecture of some of the houses within the price point we were looking at. Again, we could have gone for a $350k house but I refused to be “house poor” and working only to pay a mortgage seemed just crazy. I didn’t have my hopes up and literally told my husband “let’s look at some houses but I really don’t think we are going to find one that we love”. And so, the search began early November. We saw one I fell in love with but the neighborhood wasn’t the best and that only reinforced my thought that we were not going to find “the one”. We saw a few more and nothing stood up, if anything some of the structures made me cringe. Some other were “interesting” and “had potential” but we had to be honest with ourselves; we are not handy people, we do not take on projects like this! And I could not stand the thought of living in a project house. I wanted a renovated home that I had to do nothing to. Yeah, I know I’m not easy.

I became addicted to MLS and Zillow (ask Vanessa and my husband) and found this one house seemed interesting and had an open house the following Saturday but something told me we had to go in before the open house, so we went on Friday. We pulled up and there seemed to be people at the garage. It happened to be the owner who was cleaning up some stuff in there. The owner was Latino, that was my first sign. Then we walked around the house, which is a one story 50s rambler, completely renovated, every appliance was new, the natural light was so gorgeous, spacious, no awkward corners, finished basement, new roof, new A/C, 4 bedrooms, right on our price point, only 12 mins commute to my job…. OMG could it be?!?!

I want to dive deeper in the post finding the house process so I’m not going to go into it right now, but the long story short; the process was so smooth it was scary!

Then a month later we closed on the house and we moved in right before Christmas. So, what a Christmas present to ourselves, eh!?

I still wake up every day and I cannot believe this is our home, OURS.
A tiny piece of US soil belongs to us.