We Bought A House!

Yep, we did it, we did the damn thing and bought a house. Our first house! It's all very exciting. The whole process was, at the end of the day, pretty short and lightly terrifying, not unlike an '80s B horror movie. Here goes:

We knew at some point we would want to buy our first home so we had been saving for the down payment for years really, without a clear aim as to what that home would be or where. When we finally decided to move and that it was also time to buy a house it was June 2019. We moved in four months later.

The town we moved to isn't exactly close to New Orleans (where we were moving from) so we tried to consolidate our visits as much as possible to avoid the drive and the gas we'd need to get there and back. For the environment! And our collective wallets!

One day in mid-June of 2019 we went on six or seven house tours in a day to see the homes that were available in our price range. Because our price range was on the low end a lot of the houses we visited clearly needed a ton of work that we didn't want to tackle in our first place.

One place the backyard was a pigpen. With one very large pig.

Like, in a normal suburban neighborhood.

It was, uh, alarming since the listing said nothing about pigs and/or a destroyed backyard.

We did, however, find a cute old house that looked like it wouldn't take too much to update and we put in our offer.

From there we did. So. Much. Paperwork. Getting the mortgage figured out was really just a long stressful series of paperwork.

A few weeks later we had the home inspection and we paid a cool $350 to find out that the little house that we thought only needed some sprucing up needed a complete electrical overhaul, and required updates to the roof, foundation, both bathrooms, a couple of doors and windows, as well as removing some trees/limbs that were placed too close to the house and power lines.

Not ideal with the house already near the top of our budget.

So with a little bit of back and forth, we walked away from that little house. Emotionally we ran away, but contractually we walked away.

We had traveled up to meet the inspector when he was finished and we decided that we needed to look at any other homes in our price range ASAP before the whole walking away thing was officially done.

As luck would have it, the home we now own was put onto the market that very same morning. We came, we saw, we put in an offer, and we had to redo a bunch of that mortgage paperwork.

But finally, another (good!) inspection later, and we were in the clear.

Mostly.

See even with all that mortgage paperwork, we still weren't 100% ready for the actual closing of the house on the morning of our closing date.

Because our new town was several hours' drive away, we got up at the crack of dawn to drive up anyway, hoping that we'd get the final go-ahead on our way there.

But, as we have learned, nothing is quite that easy, and we didn't get the final okay that we needed on the way up. It came about two hours after we were supposed to have closed but luckily everyone was on board to push back until the evening to get the closing done that same day.

And then we moved up two days later.

The last few months have been a bit of a wild ride with one too many trips back and forth between the new house and New Orleans but we're finally here! We're unpacked! And we're getting settled into our new home and our new routine.