We are under contract on a house. I had no idea how taxing this process was.
We have been living in our current beautiful mid century rental home for a year now. In March we resigned the lease to go until next July. Our current home is great but the house itself needs a lot of love and a hell of a lot of maintenance. The neighborhood is amazing, the neighbors have all welcomed us in with open arms, and we even reached out to the owner to try to buy it. The owner was not even remotely prepared to sell it to us. I have loved doing small touches to this home and navigating making a space feel yours while renting, but once we heard she wasn’t willing to sell it to us I realized I was craving something bigger. So I started looking at Zillow.
I won’t go through all the details on the homes we looked at since I already wrote about that in the post linked here.
We put an offer in on a home
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Jun 27
We currently live in a stunning mid century home in an amazing neighborhood with fabulous neighbors and we love it here. But we rent. And as a designer thats really tough for me. After daydreaming about everything I would do to this home for almost a year we decided maybe we just see what was out there. If we can’t change anything about this home maybe …
But we kept searching. And we found this funky post modern home with some mountain mid century details and a whole lot of carpet. The location was exactly where we wanted it to be, it has a little bit of land, and so so so much potential. We put an offer in and it got accepted.
Now I have no idea if you’re familiar with the home buying process, but it is an absolute doozy. We did a 30 day close because we thought that was the norm, but I would not recommend that. We have had to drive to the house every single day last week to have inspections done, meet tradespeople, get quotes, figure out the loan situation, and a bunch of other things that I’m probably forgetting due to the sheer sense of overwhelm. It is a lot. But as I write this our inspection objections have been submitted and our deadline to hear back from them on this is Wednesday. Our close date is August 14th.
I flicker between moments of absolute panic, and pure excitement. Moments of, “holy shit, are we actually doing this” and moments of, “holy shit, we are actually doing this”. This house needs a lot of work but it is exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to pay a premium for a house that someone else had renovated. This is a 1980’s time capsule with the colored plumbing to tell the story.
As the days pass, things start to feel more real and I come to terms of what that means for us. Trying to figure out how to break our lease, moving logistics, renovation timeline, where our furniture will go in the house, and so much more on top of all of the other projects and clients I am working with. This is about to be a chaotic few months.
The first thing that needs to happen is the carpet HAS to go. It is so gross. The thing about redoing the floors is, when they are up that is the best time to do just about everything. That one choice impacts so many other ones. What should be a simple, “let’s replace the carpet with hardwood floors” is now, “well if the floors are up we should probably redo the kitchen” and “should we install forced air” and “well, we were already going to redo the primary bath so we should just do that too”. And now we have easily racked up 300k in renovations immediately and thats absolutely absurd (and not financially possible). We decided the solution is, we will install hardwood in all of the main spaces, and some sort of super, super cheap LVP equivalent in all of the temporary spaces such as the kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. Because I am not emotionally prepared to renovate those spaces yet and I don’t have the brain power to design those to the level I would want to.
I keep getting torn between is a hell of a lot of things. The desire to download my 3D scans of the house and start designing out every single detail and really let my creativity free, not get too ahead of myself and be smart and wait for the septic inspection to be done (our inspector couldn’t access it so we are asking the sellers to have it scoped because if this isn’t up to standards we will walk), to get a jump start on flooring and paint and wallpaper and all of the fun things we could do immediately upon moving in, to be present and enjoy the time we have in our current house because it really is so special, and also to run away and avoid all of this completely because it is a lot an my nervous system is begging for me to avoid it all and be calm.
I have no idea what is about to happen but I will absolutely be taking you along for the ride. Because lord knows it’s about to be a wild one.
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