Our New House

Yes! We bought a house! I'm typing this up in the living room of our new house as we speak. This is a picture of it back in the beginning of October. Now that big tree in the front has lost it's leaves and the bushes are twigs, and there are patches of snow on our lawn, but we still love it!

So I thought I'd share our house "story" and tell a little bit about the house...

We knew we wanted to buy a house soon after we moved to Fort Collins. Interest rates were low but slowly creeping up. Same as house prices. So we knew we wanted to buy sooner rather than later. Our apartment lease was only 5 months. We figured that would be enough time to get to know Fort Collins and figure out where the good neighborhoods/schools are and to check things out. We got referred to a good realtor and started going house hunting. Things got put on hold for a little while when I was super sick, but we started looking again seriously in October.

We really felt like we needed to stay in the ward that we were in. So we were looking at houses around our area, but just having a hard time finding anything that we liked that was in our price range. Or we would find something we liked online, but it would already be under contract. We learned quickly that the good houses go fast! We decided we needed to be more on top of it. Our realtor signed us up to get these email alerts whenever anything new came up that fit our price range.

So this house came up one day. Paul forwarded it to me and I looked at the pictures and really liked it. We called our realtor right away and went and looked at it that night. When we went to look at it, there were two other families there looking at it as well. We were kind of intimidated, but we LOVED the house! It just felt good and we could see it being our home. Keith told us that we would need to make an offer the next day because there were already some offers being made. We prayed about it that night, and felt good. We decided to make an offer even though we were sure we weren’t going to get it. There were 4 other offers made and we didn't feel comfortable going any higher than the asking price- so it was kind of a one shot deal. We just thought it would be a good experience to go through the process of making an offer and see how it works and told ourselves that if it was meant to be, then it will work out and if not, we will find something else.

We made our offer and also included a letter about us with it. Paul's brother, Jon, and his wife, Dee, did that when they put an offer on their house and they ended up getting out. So they gave us that idea. We wrote in the letter about how we were expecting our first baby and how we could see ourselves raising our family in the house (trying to pull on some heartstrings haha!). IT WORKED!! Our realtor called the next day and told us our offer was accepted. Paul and I were so surprised and kind of like- “what did we just do?” We like to think it was because of our letter, but I guess it was because we didn't have a house to sell before we could buy this one.

We went through all the paper-work and inspections and stuff. The day we signed on the house was a little nerve-wracking. I don't think I've ever signed so many papers in my life! We moved the next day on Saturday. We had help from people in our ward, so it went really fast (and we didn’t have a ton of stuff to move either)! We were most nervous about moving the piano. Luckily, our friend, Neal Johnson, moves pianos a lot for his work and was an expert on moving the piano. He brought over his equipment and everything. The Relief Society came over later and helped me clean our apartment. That was such a big help! So we’ve been in our house for a week now. The first night in our house it felt like we were staying at someone else’s house or something. It was a weird feeling. We have been slowly unpacking things and it’s started to feel more like OUR house.

So about the house… It’s 2 story with a basement. The main floor has the kitchen, living room, and a small ½ bath. The upstairs has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths (one is the master bathroom and then there is another bathroom between the other 2 rooms) And then the basement has one more room plus a bathroom and then an area that could be a play room or family room. We love the neighborhood! There are so many people from our ward that live close by.

The house seems huge compared to the little one bedroom apartments we’ve lived in. But the good thing is it will give us lots of room to grow. We see us being in this house for a while. Right now a lot of the house is empty. We still just have our college furniture, so slowly we’ll start filling the house up. I think Craigslist and Ikea are going to be our best friends.

It’s funny because I always thought that I would feel super grown up when I bought my first house. I’ve thought that about different milestones in my life- like when I got married or graduated from BYU, and I think that now about when I have this baby. But I'm not sure if you ever feel "grown up"? Sometimes I still feel like I’m 16 and have no clue what I’m doing. Anyway, maybe that is just me?

And just FYI- we have lots of room for guests... hint, hint, wink, wink ;) So come and visit us! We are taking reservations!!

I know some people have asked to see pictures of the inside. I need to take some pictures. But right now we're still unpacking and things are kind of a little crazy. Maybe next blog post I will give you a tour of the inside?