Home Sweet Home

So, our house has been for sale for the past few months.  We've had soooo much interest.  We 'sold' it twice, but both times fell through due to the buyer's financing.  Because it's in a really good school district that has no apartment complexes, we have had tons of offers of land contract, rent-to-own, or just plain renting.

All the while, we've been looking into our options.  Do we want to buy or build?  I won't bore you with our insane list of pros/cons, but suffice it to say that we exhausted every option.  One of our big stumbling blocks was that I just don't see the point of buying or building a home that we know won't be our 'forever' house.  I totally get that plans change and life loves to throw curveballs, I just didn't want to buy or build a home that we were already planning to move out of eventually, you know?

We were pretty much planning on building until we realized that to build the house we would really want, we would have to extend ourselves to the top of the budget.  And frankly, that's just not a fun place to be.  We've been there for the past 8 years, and we don't want to go back.  We've just had a very unsettling feeling about this whole process.  It was seriously bumming me out because, hello, this is supposed to be fun!

Thanks to a very well-timed message from a friend, last night MacGyver and I had a very real conversation.  We looked at our assets and tried our best to look to the future.  We made a pretty big decision:  house NOT for sale!

We decided to pour just a little more of our souls into this home.  For starters, we love it.  We love the location, we love the lot, and we love how we've made it look over the past 7 years.  I love to walk through and remember all of the projects we did on our own, learning as we went.  This is the house we brought both of our babies home to, and we realized that we don't *have* to move.  Not now, and not ever.  Maybe we'll want to build our dream house in several years, but for now, we're going to make this our dream house.

Before we pass go, before we collect $200, we're going to add on a family room.  One of the biggest problems we have now is that we don't have a place for the toys or a second living space.  So we're going to add a room one, which is actually something that most people in our neighborhood have already done.  Then we'll re-arrange the current living space to create a more defined entryway and a toy room/office.

The best part is that we feel so good about it.  For the first time in so many months, it's exciting.  We're planning to stay here for at least another 10 years.  By then, student loans will be nothing but a memory, and we'll absolutely have 20% equity.  Then we can use this as a rental, which will be awesome since it is already generating such rental interest. 

So here's to a few months of drywall dust covering everything we own!