Every year at the beginning of the year I make a list of all of these grandeur goals from my bucket list items thinking this will FINALLY be the year I check them all off! Then every year in December I look back and realize I haven’t scratched any of them off. Surely, I can’t be the only one to relate to this? But not this year! At the end of last month, I’m excited to announce I finally crossed one of my top goals off of my bucket list! Building a house!
Obviously I’ve been a little MIA for a few weeks, but between work and moving and finishing up with building the house, I haven’t had much time to post some updates on life! Now that we’re starting to settle in I’ll start posting some of the updates on the house as we finish decorating each room up. For now, I thought I would post a little bit about our journey to build the house and some photos.
Last fall we were living in an apartment that we loved when we suddenly got a new landlord and everything started going downhill at plane-falling-out-of-the-sky-burning kind of pace. We knew we had to move, but as we started looking for other places in the area we wanted to live in the prices were just crazy! So we started looking outside of our area and the more and more we looked around at renting, we both just felt unsettled about it. We’d never really considered that we’d be able to buy a house right now, but I was so disheartened by shopping for places to rent that I couldn’t help but look into buying, but even then as we browsed house listings we just couldn’t nail down what we wanted for the price we wanted. I mean, it’s a lot of money to spend on something you aren’t totally in love with, right?? And it’s a huge decision, it’s where we will be living, where our family is going to make memories, right? I couldn’t help myself but to be picky.
The problem with being picky is that it significantly limits your options. It’s both a talent and a curse that I have. (Now why can’t I apply that to food to make dieting easier??) So we started looking into building. I found a builder that I really liked and had great reviews, and we toured some of their model homes. Our first meeting with the builder, we chose our floorplan and some of the basic structural detail for our home. They had a floorplan that we loved and was perfect for our family, so we ended up just selecting that plan and then we made a few adjustments to make it work better for us. We were so excited about the whole process that we pretty much chose out all of our options (for things like floor, counters, cabinets, furnishings, etc.) within a couple of weeks. They broke ground about a month later and started to build!
It felt like both the longest and shortest 5 months following to complete our home! On one hand we were beyond excited and the time felt like it was dragging with how long it would take, but as we drove by several times a week and watched the progress, it really was pretty incredible that they got it all up and finished in such a short amount of time! Most of the last 6 weeks I have spent cleaning, purging, packing, moving, unpacking, trying to decide where everything goes in the new house. Once we got our new keys, there were a few things that we wanted to do before actually moving our stuff in, like painting and sealing the garage floor, so that added to the craziness, too. I’m really glad that we chose to get it all done before we moved in so we don’t have to do it later, but seriously the last several weeks have felt like an endless blurred tornado! I feel exhausted, but I’m so happy to finally be in my own new home with my family and I’m really excited to share some of these photos of our house-building journey!
We still have a lot to get unpacked and decorated, but I’m excited to show off each part of the house as we get it pulled together and will do room reveals as they come! If you have any questions for me about our house building process or journey, be sure to ask in the comments or shoot me an email!
XXOO
Sunny