Ok guys as you can tell from the title I have some pretty exciting news to share… we bought a house!! Yep that’s right Calvin and I are now officially home owners! If you’re from Canada you know how crazy the real estate market is right now so I’m really proud of our hard work that got us here.
Now funny enough the plan was not to buy a house this year… nope we were planning a trip to Hawaii in the fall and had put buying a house on the back burner. Like a said the Canadian real estate market has been crazy the last few years, especially in BC which is of course where we live. As much as we love our province and couldn’t imagine moving back east it has it’s draw backs. Like the cost of living… it’s just really expensive!
Anyway I hadn’t been thinking too much about houses. We were putting money away for a down payment and had decided to take a nice vacation and buy a place in a few years when the market hopefully had cooled down a bit. Since we wanted a single family home we knew we could be waiting awhile and we were mostly ok with that. Then one Saturday night we were at home chatting about real estate and I opened my computer to see what was for sale. It had been quite a while since I’d looked since it’s really discouraging to look at places you know you can’t afford. Much to my surprise an adorable house in a good neighbourhood, and at a good price popped up. I was shocked and surprised. I immediately showed the place to Calvin and he was also surprised to see a nice house like that for a reasonable price. So we decided to go to the open house on Sunday.
As soon as we drove into the neighbourhood that Sunday I knew I wanted to live there. It just felt like home. I don’t really know how to describe it I knew in my gut that neighbourhood was the one for us. When we got to the house we really liked it, but it was small. But we loved it and really wanted to put in an offer.
Unfortunately by the time we got our act together the owners had already accepted another offer. We were bummed! It was our first taste of how competitive and quick moving real estate is. But loosing out on that house made us realize that we really did want to buy a house now.
So we started the hunt looking all over for the perfect place. We saw a lot of the wrong houses for us. Everything was so cramped, small and old. We did eventually find a few places we really liked but the commute to downtown would have been horrible. I won’t lie at times it was pretty discouraging.
Finally we returned to that first neighbourhood, the one we loved, and there was the perfect house. A brand new home with lots of space, 3 bedrooms and basement. Lots of room for us to grow into. We knew not too let this gem slip away! So we made an offer in April and it was accepted!!!
We bought our home at the dry way stage so it has been so fun to watch the whole building process and see the home we envisioned come together. It really is better than we ever could have imagined! And I’m so excited to get cooking in my new kitchen!!! This is a home we very likely will be staying in for a long time (although never say never!) so we will defiantly be doing a few things to it to make it feel more personal and homey. I’ll of course be sharing that process!!
I’m so grateful we were able to make this big step into home ownership and can’t wait to create many memories here!
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