I have kept this secret for at least 2 months! It was really hard to not talk about it to anyone because it’s our first house. We are really excited about it. If you know me, you know I am also SUPERSTITIOUS!! I didn’t want to jinx it. Plus, I wasn’t expecting to buy a house until after the baseball season. I mean, we did just moved to Peoria in September.
We just got all of our stuff in our apartment. I was starting to unpack and make our apartment more homey. We had some issues early on with our apartment but they were quick to fix it. Then it didn’t get fixed, and they were doing things we just didn’t like it. The biggest thing is that they would come into our apartment without notice. Heisman has never bit anyone before, but we like to be there just in case. This happened 3-4 times before we had enough. We decided to start looking for a house. My goal was to find a house by the end of February because I wasn’t going to move alone. I wanted to be in a house before baseball season.
STARTING THE PROCESS
I started searching Zillow in our price range. Considering we just moved to Peoria we had no idea where to even look. On weekends we would just drive around and look at houses. After work we would look and add more houses to our list. At one point we had 50 houses saved. Our realtor also sent us a few houses, but for the most part we had them saved.
Our realtor wanted to show us a few houses on Saturday. We decided to look at some houses on our lists before meeting with her. Some we took off after stopping by and seeing it in person. We learned pictures and actual were 2 different things. Before we went go meet with our realtor, we stopped by our house. The outside is perfect and I loved it even more in person than I did with the photos. I knew that this was our house!
We went to go look at the pre-selected houses. Some were just horrible when we got in there, but we found one that we almost put an offer on. Then we told them we went looking at houses before meeting, and I wanted to look at the inside of one house. I wanted to see the inside before putting an offer in on the last house.
THE OFFER
We drove over to our house. I was so excited to see the inside to make sure I saw everything before putting in an offer. Gary went to find something wrong with it so we could put an offer in on the other house or keeping looking. Our goal was to put an offer in on a house by the weekend. If we wanted to get into our house before the busyness of the season, we needed to put an offer in before the end of the year.
There was obviously nothing wrong with house, so we put in offer that day. We accepted their counter on Sunday. My only regret was we didn’t close sooner. We really should have done 30 day because we were so ready to get out of the apartment and our new adventure.
MOVE IN DAY
We closed on our house and started moving everything in right after. The movers came to help with all of our big stuff the next day. We had everything in our new house by Saturday night. I started putting everything away that night. By Sunday night all of the stuff we use daily was put away. It will take some time to get everything where we want it. We also still have some projects to do. Some are super easy and we’ll do a little bit each weekend. Some we are going to wait until the off season to get someone too look at the house. Our big project will be turning our attic into our master bedroom.
NEW ADVENTURE
I am so excited about this new adventure in our life. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t expecting to even start the process until the off season. We recently moved to Peoria, the season is about to start, and we don’t know the area. I was thinking we would get settled in our new area before paying a house. There isn’t a whole lot that needs to be done to the house. We have some small projects that we knew about from the exceptions. After that we might do some painting in the bedrooms. One of the bedrooms we don’t like the color at ALL. I am not sure when we will do these projects because baseball season is coming up. Plus, I don’t want to do too much before figuring out what we can do with the bedstairs.
I am so excited for this new adventure. I keep calling it an adventure because it truly is for me. This is something I can’t believe that it happened. I can’t wait to see how this journey unfolds.
