We Bought a House!

**DREAM HAUS**

We’re Officially Home Owners
We searched high and low, far and wide, and we finally found her.

Now, she’s not perfect… but she’s ours!

The Good

First off, we are so grateful to our family and friends for bearing with us as we trekked hundreds of miles over weekends for months and months in search of this house. Thank you for letting us stay in your houses to shorten our commute. Thanks for accommodating our crazy schedules so we could hang out (and stay sane). Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for sending us house listings! Thank you for lending us your ears and shoulders when the search wasn’t going well.

It hasn’t been an easy process, so it’s a great relief that we’ve made it here. If you remember, we had our wishlist and at points in this search, we were willing to be very flexible. But we’re so glad we held steady and trusted our gut to lean into our priority items. We were very fortunate to not have a strict timeline for our move so we could be extra picky.

The Bad

Unfortunately, we were also looking in extremely competitive markets… and that left us with plenty of disappointments (again, please reference the list linked above). It’s not easy finding a 3+ acre property in the NYC tristate area within a reasonable commuting distance. Clearly, we never said never because we did find plenty of options. And magically, it worked out for us, but it was NOT easy.

We experienced houses selling within 30 minutes of going on the market while we were touring the house — we were the first tour. We were outbid by hundreds of thousands of dollars with people bidding close to 50% over the asking price (and a realtor actually called us to tell us we needed to be more aggressive with our offers). But through all those low lows and completely disheartening moments, we continued to stay optimistic that we’d find the right house where everything would fall into place.

The Ugly

So, this is where things may come as a shock. Or maybe it won’t (again, reference the list linked above). This house ticked all of the boxes for our priority items. But it wasn’t pretty. Not quite ugly, but she’s definitely waiting for her 90s rom-com make-over.

Given our extensive wishlist, it may not come as a surprise that this (not-so) beauty, needs some updating. And quite a bit of work given the previous owners were smokers. IN. THE. HOUSE. That’s a big no-no for us and it very nearly kept us from going through with this purchase.

But! We really loved the neighborhood, the land, and the potential this property offered. So, we did a substantial amount of research on what we needed to do to abate the house of nicotine and smoke (more on that in an upcoming post). And we came to the decision that we could tackle this update and slowly make this house ours.

With that, we’d like to introduce you to our house! She needs some work, but we’ve got a plan. Stay tuned as we make this Haus our home.