“It was pretty sudden. We had kind of mentioned it and then Eric went to a first time homebuyer class and we were like, ‘oh, we’re buying a house’. It was on the radar that we wanted to get a house in the next few years, but it wasn’t really a possibility until suddenly Eric’s company sold and all the sudden we had the downpayment and with both of our leases ending, now seemed as good of a time as any.
Starting the process was less intimidating than we thought it would be. I think the actual process itself was scary but that fact that our timeframe went way faster than we expected really helped. We have friends that are on their 14th offer and I just can’t imagine the emotional stress of that. I think we both would have quit by then. Once we closed it was smooth sailing.
We’ve been piecing it together to furnish the house. We toughed it out with literally almost nothing to start. We definitely had the conversation about getting married now just so we can have a registry to furnish the house. We had to buy pretty much everything since all our stuff was roommate furniture that was worn out. For a while we just had a couch and would eat on that everyday since we didn’t have a table. Every three months we get more furniture. Now that we’re buying nice things, it’s way different. We don’t let the dogs on the furniture anymore. It does feel good to finally feel like we can have adult things and invest a little bit in stuff we actually want, not just grab something off Craigslist for $100. The yard is a pretty good allegory for the rest of the house because there’s sections of it that are nice but the rest of it is kinda…ugh.
The hardest part of the whole house process was putting together that IKEA shelving. It fell on me. We almost broke up. It literally smashed me.
No really, the hardest part was living through the limbo period where we had put the offer in and it had been accepted but we hadn’t closed. We were so worried that something was going to go wrong. Eric was so nervous, thinking that it would be all his fault since the loan was only in his name and I was going to disappointed. We couldn’t really imagine what would actually go wrong but you hear all those horror stories of something coming up two days before closing and then the whole thing falls apart.
I think the other tough thing was trying to get our house together after we closed while prepping for Burning Man. We needed every weekend for organizing our camp, but also we both work and we needed to get our house together so we figured we’d just live in an empty house for almost 2 months. Honestly, it wasn’t too tough those since I imagine everyone moves in and just lives with boxes. We’re pretty good communicators so we can handle those stressful situations fairly well. I think buying this house has helped us become even better at that.
We’ve done some things that are really dumb. We actually bought the table right away in June since we liked it, but we didn’t actually get these chairs or the coffee table until the end of January. So we could never eat at our table for the first 6 months since we could never find bar stools to match. The bar stools we have now definitely aren’t part of the set, they don’t even match. We definitely didn’t really think some things through.
This is the nicest place I’ve ever lived other than my parents’ house and I own it. Every other place was a crappy rental that you just put up with because that’s what you do, but this is our own home and it’s the nicest place I’ve lived – that’s so cool! I don’t know if that means the house is nice or the places I’ve lived are crappy, but I don’t care.”
