Home Sweet Home

I posted on Instagram last night that we bought a house, so here’s the story of how we went from not looking to buy to homeowners in 6 weeks:

Jon and I had always had moving to Long Island in our plans for the future. After I left my job, we really didn’t have a reason to be living in the city (besides of course, loving the city). Jon has worked in Long Island for almost 7 years, making the reverse commute out of the city every day. We were also paying city taxes and of course living in a one bedroom apartment and dealing with street parking (our car has been hit while parked so many times that I’ve lost count) and walking the dog in sub-zero temperatures, many times with toddler in tow. While we were planning to move, we weren’t looking to buy.

We were planning to rent. Home prices out here are sky high and so we just never even thought about buying. We would check Craig’s List pretty regularly looking for rentals. We wanted to rent something that was dog friendly with a yard, 2 bedrooms and close to Jon’s office. The pickings were slim.

Then one Sunday afternoon I was scrolling through Facebook and saw an ad that the Property Brothers were coming to the New York area and looking for applicants. Without even telling Jon, I decided to apply.

(For anyone who isn’t obsessed with HGTV like myself, Property Brothers is a show where the brothers help find you a fixer upper and then renovate it into your dream home. Spoiler alert: they didn’t call us back.)

So here I am, applying for the show and it asks if you’re interested in a particular home. We of course weren’t, so I said no and tried to submit the application. But the application couldn’t be submitted without the listing from a home of interest, so I literally did a super fast Google search for our budget and area and our house came up as one of the first homes. I liked the street name, the house was in the perfect area, within our price range, in excellent condition but still needed some fixing up. So I put it on the application and hit submit.

We went about the rest of our day, and then did Adelaide’s bedtime routine. After she was down I looked at Jon and told him I couldn’t stop thinking about this house. So he looked at it and agreed that he also loved it.

Then I called my mom and told her. She always talks me down from my crazy plans, but she loved the idea as well.

Jon and I then decided we’d go see the house, and see if we liked it as much in person as we did online. I emailed a realtor that a friend recommended and he got back to me that we could go see the house on Tuesday.

Tuesday we went to see the house without even being pre-approved by the bank (not recommended, ha). We loved it. Maybe even more in person than online. It was built 60 years ago and the same owner has lived in it the entire time, taking excellent care of it. You could really tell this home had been loved.

We got the bad news that someone else had just put in an offer, so there was competition. Jon got the ball rolling on getting pre-approval with the bank and we submitted a full priced offer the next morning. A painstaking 24 hours went by when we finally got the call that our offer had been accepted.

That weekend we did the home inspection, which came back much better than we had anticipated. You never know with an older home, and we were pleasantly surprised that all of the issues that came up were really minor.

We were officially under contract the Monday after Thanksgiving and closed on the house on Tuesday, December 30th.

Six weeks exactly from the day we saw the house.

(Also my dad’s 60th birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad!)

So we’ve spent the last 2 weeks packing and unpacking. There’s not much to show at the moment because all the projects we’ve done haven’t necessarily been blog worthy.

I hope to share with you the transformation of the house as we go along.

That being said, what should our first big project be??

Thanks so much for all of the words of congratulations. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, we’ve got room for visitors (and extra hammers).