Get ready for some (okay, a lot of) pictures :)
In January we put an offer on our house, got it accepted (yay!), and went through our first home buying process! In preparation we spent our first couple years of marriage watching tons of HGTV. :) But really, you can learn a lot on the Property Virgin or My First Place shows. Even House Hunters has some good material. Really what we learned from watching an abundance of home buying shows was that we needed to come up with things that were truly non-negotiable versus things we really, really, really, REALLY wanted. Our easiest decision was that the house had to be good for resale. That really became our main non-negotiable as we went through home after home and realized that we could pretty much be flexible enough to make anything work.
If I could give one piece of advice to first time (or whatever time) home buyers, it would be to really evaluate what the home means to where you are in life. When we first started our search we were looking for our ideal house...3 bed, 2+ bath, 1700+ sqft, huge yard...and we thought there was no way we could compromise on any of those things. However, it turned out that western Washington is pretty expensive! It really caused us to step back and re-evaluate what we thought we
had to have. What it eventually came down to were three things: resale value, safety of the neighborhood, and private roads/sidewalks. Those three things covered where we are in life now... First, we know we will be moving in a few years, so we have to be able to resell quickly. Second, Mitch will be gone a decent amount on flying trips and we wanted a home where I felt safe by myself. Finally, we are not ashamed to admit that our dogs played a decent part in our home search, that is just part of being a responsible and loving dog owner. We love to go running with our dogs and if we couldn't do that in a safe area with sidewalks or wide, not busy streets, we couldn't do it.
The other thought I would suggest evaluating (okay, so I have two pieces of advice...), is what will you have to look forward to if you have it all now? Thinking about that really helped us contextualize our home search. It seemed like we forgot for awhile that we are young, this is our first home, and it is not our forever home.
Also, to clarify, yes, we bought our house without seeing it in person first. Is that the path for everyone? No. Did we care about the negative reactions to how we went about buying our first house? No. Are we happy with our decision? A million times YES.
Mitch and I did a ton of research, found an amazing realtor that we trusted, and did a ton more research. This was our 5th move in less than 3 years, so we were ready to be settled. Sure, moving into an apartment temporarily to get to know the area better before we bought could have worked well also, but we didn't want to move AGAIN. Can you tell I have some residual emotions about all this when I talk about it? Ha! Anyway, we are so happy with our new home and new town! Thank you to everyone who did support us and offered constructive help along the way. :)
Our house is still a work in progress, but I did take some 'before' pictures so we could reflect on our updates along the road. Enjoy!
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| Right after we first arrived :) |
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| The pups went straight for the HUGE windows! |
Now, please excuse the ridiculous amount of clutter. I didn't think to take "before" pictures
before we started bringing stuff in. Oh well.
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| Entry | |
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| Living Room | |
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| Dining Room | |
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| Kitchen from Dining Room |
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| Kitchen from hallway |
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| Hallway |
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| Office |
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| Office view 2 | |
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| Bathroom |
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| Guest Room | |
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| Guest Room view 2 |
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| Our Room |
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| Our Room view 2 |
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| Basement stairs |
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| Basement half bath + laundry |
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| Basement |
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| Basement view 2 |
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| Garage |
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| Garage view 2 |
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| Backyard |
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| Backyard view 2 |
So those are all of the before pictures. We have completed a few projects and are starting a few others. :) Here are some pictures of the work in progress!
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| Painting our bedroom :) |
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| Mitch taking apart our old closet! |
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| Our new closet system installed :) |
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| New gray basement! |
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| Pups hated that they weren't allowed to help ;) |
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| Testing out the red accent wall! |
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| Really becoming an OSU basement :) |
I will save "after" photos for a separate post when we are completely finished with the projects :)
We have also changed the locks, installed new lighting fixtures and added a dimmer switch, put up a wire fence on the backyard hill (since the dogs figured out how to jump the wall and get to the neighbors yards ;) ), and started planning for the kitchen and bathroom renovations :) We have a TON we want to work on and we are having a lot of fun making the house ours! Stay tuned for more project updates :)
