If you follow me on any sort of social media, you probably have heard our news.
We're buying a house!!!
Next week at this time I will have woken up in a new zip code, driven a short little drive to work, and I will leave at the end of the day and head home to Crestwood. Jason and I could not be more excited to move, and more importantly, we give all of the glory to God. He truly has given us this house...for us, it came out of left field.
On September 22nd, we will celebrate our first wedding anniversary! Since January, we've been planning to begin our house hunt after our anniversary. We've been saving like crazy since before we got married for this ambiguous "something", and back in January we realized that "something" would probably be our first home. Jason and I have never picked out a place to live together since when we got married, he moved into the apartment that I already lived in, so that has made this whole process even more exciting.
Obviously, thing did not go as we planned. By September 22nd, we will have been in our house for 3 weeks...so yeah...good job planning Morales'! But as always, we know that God has a bigger plan for us than we can even fathom, and that has never been more true than in buying our house.
Here's how this happened - A few months back, I started to get an email each morning that showed me new listings or listing that had been reduced in price in the areas we wanted to look at buying a house. I figured that it'd be good to get a feel for what's out there before we actually start looking, and also, it's just really fun to look at houses and dream.
Also a few months ago, we randomly drove by an open house on a Sunday afternoon in Homewood. The house was way too small and way too expensive, but we really liked the realtor who was showing it. We got his card and information, and we decided we'd call him when we were ready to start looking in late September.
On Jason's birthday, July 24th, I got an email with this cute little 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house as a new listing. So I did some investigating. I looked at the pictures, looked where it was on Google Maps, and ran the numbers for our budget. After I decided that it had some potential, I sent it to Jason. That night after we went to dinner for his birthday, we decided to drive by it just to see if we liked the neighborhood and the outside in real life. We did. We really really liked it.
The next day, which was a Thursday, we decided to contact the realtor we met at the open house to see if we could go see the house on Friday. So Friday after work, we headed out to Crestwood to look at our first house together.
We loved it.
Jason was a little concerned about the size of the bedrooms, and our realtor assured us that the size is pretty standard for all of the houses in the area. Our realtor said that he wished we'd already looked at a few homes already because if we had, we'd probably love this house even more (which I didn't even think was possible).
We had a lot to think about. Jason and I spent the rest of the evening in the Crestwood area. We ate dinner there, we hung out with friends there, and we kind of just pretended that we lived there. That night when we got home, we decided that we needed to do our due diligence and look at comparable houses, but we were probably going to make an offer on that house.
Saturday Jason went to work and I spent the day on the phone with a mortgage broker to get our financing in order. He got all of my information and basically said that we were good to look at anything under a certain amount. That was good enough for me, so that night we looked at 4 other houses, and then went back to the first house. We still loved it most.
We spent Saturday night in our realtor's office writing up our offer.
It took until Tuesday or Wednesday for us to hear that we had the house. It was ours if we wanted it. It's taken a couple of weeks, a lot of signing, proving our incomes, and a lot of other stuff, but in 5 days, we will close on our house!
I can't help but dream about where we'll put our furniture, how I'll decorate, what we'll change, and what we'll leave the same...but even more than that, I can't help but dream about all of the memories we'll create there. It's a perfect home for us in so many ways, but most of all, it's the perfect home for us because this is where God has placed us.
Stay tuned for updates about moving, decorating, and some DIY projects that I'll be doing over the next couple of weeks and months!
