I am thankful for my home. Exactly four years ago today, Tom & I saw our house for the first time, 31 days later, we were homeowners. It was a whirlwind four years ago going through the whole process, but it was so worth it.

We had been looking for a house for about six months when we stumbled across this house – we were in no rush to buy a house and would not settle for anything we we’re happy with. After issues with one realtor, we found a new one. In the process of switching realtors, we had found a house that we loved, and by an odd string of events, we met the owners and started talking directly with them – unfortunately we weren’t able to agree on a number, but we were so excited about that house and I had done lots of research on the town and neighborhood. About two months later, it was a Saturday morning and I woke up before Tom — we had planned to do our 16 mile bike ride and have a campfire with some friends that night. Since I was up, I did my daily check-in on all the sites to see if any new homes had been listed and there I saw a house in the exact same neighborhood we looked at in September, the back of this property butts up to the other property. As soon as Tom woke up, I showed him the listing (I’m pretty sure I put the iPad in his face before he was actually awake) and we decided to drive by the house after our ride to see how it looked from the outside. While we were there, our new realtor sent me the listing and said she thought the house would be perfect for us. We agreed and asked her to set up time for us to see if Monday after work.

Monday came, and we spent nearly two hours looking at the house and property (while the realtor’s husband sat in the car waiting to go to dinner). We all knew, this was it – we absolutely wanted to make an offer. Tom and I talked about it for hours, talked about it some more in the morning, and more over lunch, and then after work on Tuesday, we met with our realtor to fill out some papers and put in our offer. We heard back the next morning that they wanted our best and final offer since they had others, so we gave it and waited. On Friday morning, all of three minutes before I was about to head into a big meeting at work, our offer was accepted! By the time I was done with the meeting, we had 48 minutes to call the bank to start mortgage papers since Monday was a bank holiday and our bid was accepted partially because we agreed to close exactly four weeks from the day our first offer went in (which also happened to land on our anniversary). Even with Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving in between our offer being accepted and our closing, we managed to get everything done (also in part thanks is owed to my very understanding bosses who let me prioritize anything house related for a month) and we closed on our anniversary just 31 days after we first laid eyes on the house.

We still have a lot of work to do on the house (we knew it was a fixer-upper when we bought it) but it is ours and each project we finish makes it that much more ours. Our first projects involved upgrading the electric and buying a new washer, dryer and oven. This year’s projects got put on hold due to other plans life had for us, but we still managed to get a lot of tree work done, including felling three tress, buying a new fridge and switching from an oil fired hot water heater to an electric hot water heater.