Finally, after many years, I have managed to get into a good enough financial situation to become a homeowner. I had originally intended to start looking for one near the time that my rental lease for our townhome was ending, however a few things happened that made us bump that up a lot. Namely, our laundry machine broke, and it took well over a week for someone to even come out and determine it was broken, and then it was another couple of weeks before it was replaced. Which meant we had to use the local laundromat. AND THEN, we had decided to get a snake. The pet policy said we only had to get permission from the office before purchasing a pet, and we thought they’d wave it right through being as snakes are, well, not as likely to destroy things as say, our cats or the dogs our neighbors had. But nope, flatly refused, and no explanation as to why. Funnily enough, that wound up being the proverbial last straw and we started looking around to see what kind of rates we could get and what the market looked like.
It wound up being favorable enough. Got our loan pre-approval, called up our local realtor, had our Bible study group start praying, and and began looking around. Literally the second day we toured houses we came across one that had just come back onto the market when the financing for the previous buyer fell through. And it was perfect. Far better than we had expected to see at our price point. Five bed, 2 bath, almost 3k sqft, basement, garage, large generally flat backyard with a well maintained fence, and even a fruit tree (albeit, it looks to have been planted about six months earlier, but still). New roof, new paint, excellent driveway, and in a quiet suburb on a dead end, so no through traffic. It just doesn’t get much better than this. Even offering significantly over the asking price, it felt like highway robbery. The funny thing is, every time we went out there it was absolutely pouring with rain, so we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt there was no leaking.
We’ve spent the last week unpacking. And buying all that stuff that is suddenly incredibly important to have. Like shelves and a refrigerator. And rakes, new locks for the doors, a home security system, lots of tools, new this, new that, and I think after spending probably $5k+ we have all the major expenditures out of the way in terms of outright necessity. We have also built out a list of further purchases once we get our finances back in order again here in a few months.
The master bedroom downstairs was way too big for me to want to use as an actual bedroom. So we converted it into a gaming room.
The new “Master Bedroom” is located partly under the stairs. It’s pretty small, but does the job. It’ll be better once I install the closet racks and we can put away clothes. Upstairs is a very nice living room, and I mounted the old TV on the wall, giving plenty of space for the consoles beneath. There’s a room for our computers, and a room that doubles as a library and my work from home office. We also have a nice guest bedroom my wife is currently painting.
All in all, I couldn’t be more thankful, and I really look forward to living here for a very long while.
