Buying a House and Getting Engaged!

No bury­ing the lede on this one — my fiancé and I are buy­ing a house! That’s right, we got engaged, too! 

When I say that Novem­ber 2023 was one of the most over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive and busy months of my life, I am not exag­ger­at­ing in the slightest. 

I can’t write two sep­a­rate posts on these events and drag it out like a “good” blog­ger would prob­a­bly do because they are so inter­twined with each oth­er that I have to tell both sto­ries at once. 

The Origins

My fiancé (still can­not wrap my head around that word!) and I met in August 2022 and start­ed offi­cial­ly dat­ing in Sep­tem­ber 2022. We went to Gulf Shores with most of his fam­i­ly after Christ­mas 2022, went on an amaz­ing all-inclu­sive vaca­tion to Mex­i­co in Feb­ru­ary 2023, expe­ri­enced EconoMe togeth­er in March 2023, took a trip to Nashville for Spring Break in April 2023, had our lives changed at the Tay­lor Swift Eras Tour show in Kansas City July 2023, vis­it­ed friends in Long­mont CO, cel­e­brat­ed our first anniver­sary, and vis­it­ed friends in the Car­oli­nas in Sep­tem­ber 2023. 

Some­where along the way, we fell mad­ly, deeply, and ridicu­lous­ly in love. 

Now, he’s been mar­ried before and long-time read­ers will know I’ve not been mar­ried before. As the year went on, we dis­cussed what we want­ed our rela­tion­ship to look like in the future and our indi­vid­ual stances on mar­riage. I have some deep-seat­ed rela­tion­ship anx­i­ety and feel that a ring and piece of paper from the state makes a psy­cho­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence. He had his own hangups around mar­riage (which in respect to him I won’t be putting here on the inter­net, although I have no such qualms when it comes to my inner psy­che, so you’re wel­come, I guess?), so we took our time to real­ly hear what the oth­er was say­ing and what would be the best approach for both of us. 

“Took your time? Gwen, you guys dat­ed for just over a year and haven’t even known each oth­er for two years yet! That’s so fast!!” 

Long sto­ry short, we’re aware. The old trope of “when you know, you know” is cer­tain­ly true here. At 33 and 41, we have a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of who we are, what we want in a part­ner, and what we need to have a healthy rela­tion­ship than if we were say, in our ear­ly 20s. 

A Realization

Some­time in late September/early Octo­ber, I real­ized I need­ed to let my land­lord know if I was going to renew my lease when it was up at the end of Jan­u­ary. My lease states I need to give 60 days’ notice if I’m going to move out so she has time to get it ready and list it before my lease is up. So, this was the trig­ger for a few talks on what we want­ed to do hous­ing-wise for 2024. Cur­rent­ly, we’ve been split­ting our time between his place and my place which are 30 min­utes away from each oth­er. We did­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want to do that for anoth­er year, since it required us to main­tain 2 house­holds and pay for dupli­cates of basi­cal­ly everything.

His kid­do is cur­rent­ly in mid­dle school, so we decid­ed it was best if I moved to them. I can’t fit my stuff in their apart­ment, and there aren’t many 3‑bedroom rentals in town. That left either rent­ing or buy­ing a house. Rent­ing a house in his town is EXPENSIVE as the school dis­trict is real­ly good, so that left buy­ing a house. 

Buying a House

What a time to buy a house. Crazy how just a few years makes such a dif­fer­ence between buy­ing a house in 2021 and now. Inter­est rates have increased from 3% then to in the 7% range now, which means my pur­chas­ing pow­er has decreased. 

After we decid­ed buy­ing was the way to go, we start­ed keep­ing an eye on Zil­low for prop­er­ties to show up. I’m not even jok­ing when I say inven­to­ry is low. We wait­ed 10 WHOLE DAYS for one prop­er­ty to be list­ed, and it was­n’t even one that fit our criteria. 

We want­ed a house that had 3 bed­rooms, an ensuite pri­ma­ry bath­room, a full bath­room for his kid­do, and prefer­ably a half bath for guest usage. We also want­ed walk­a­ble to the cen­ter of town, a 2 car attached garage, some­where to work on projects, and ease of access to the net­work of mul­ti-use trails that criss­cross town. We attend­ed a few open hous­es, got a real­tor, got preap­proved, viewed a few hous­es the day they came on the mar­ket, and final­ly found one we liked enough to put an offer on. It was a super cute house built in the 1950s with a detached 2‑car garage and workshop. 

When we got home from the show­ing, my fiancé was feel­ing a lot of anx­i­ety on my behalf that I was will­ing to buy a house with a guy I was­n’t mar­ried to (again). Even though every­thing turned out fine in the end! He knew I was get­ting some feed­back from fam­i­ly and friends on that, so he thought he might head that off and make this time dif­fer­ent by proposing. 

It was per­fec­tion. Of course, I start­ed cry­ing and imme­di­ate­ly said yes! 

That was Novem­ber 1^st! The list­ing agent pulled some shady behav­iors (that even made our super love­ly and won­der­ful real­tor pissed off) so we end­ed up hav­ing the sec­ondary offer on that house. 

You know what you get when you fin­ish in sec­ond place on a house? Not a damn thing. But heyyyy we did­n’t care, we were rid­ing the high of get­ting engaged! 

The Deets

Long sto­ry some­what short­er, 2 weeks lat­er a house came on the mar­ket that checked all our box­es. We went to see it, loved it imme­di­ate­ly, put an offer in, and had it accept­ed the next day! The list price was $310k but we want­ed the sell­ers to accept our offer instead of hav­ing to fight oth­ers after the upcom­ing open house. Thus, we offered $322,500, 1% earnest mon­ey, and no repairs under $10,000. The appraisal came back at $324k. The inspec­tion found noth­ing wrong beyond adding a few more smoke detec­tors, mit­i­gat­ing some radon in the base­ment, and one thresh­old that needs to be replaced. 

The house is 2 lev­els laid out next to each oth­er for a total of 4 floors. I am delib­er­ate­ly avoid­ing using the word “split-lev­el” as I don’t like split-lev­el hous­es and it’s not real­ly a split-lev­el. That style sug­gests an entry where you imme­di­ate­ly have to go up or down, where­as our house does not have that. It does, how­ev­er, have 3 bed­rooms, an ensuite on the pri­ma­ry bath­room, a full bath for the kid­do, a half bath for guests, an attached two-car garage, an unfin­ished base­ment per­fect for my stained glass work and a work­shop for him, a real­ly amaz­ing ginor­mous gaze­bo in the back­yard, and it’s next door to the bike trail. 

It was orig­i­nal­ly built in 1992 and has­n’t been updat­ed much since then, so we have some minor cos­met­ic updates to do before we move in May 2024. That’s when our leas­es are up, after I worked with my land­lord to have mine extend­ed. (Which was mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial since she can get high­er rents in May and more peo­ple are look­ing then as opposed to January.)

We closed on the house in the mid­dle of Decem­ber and are so excit­ed to be able to live together!

So, to recap.…

In two weeks, I got engaged, ran a project at work solo for the first time, and bought a house. Like I said at the begin­ning, over­whelm­ing and amaz­ing in the best way pos­si­ble! Stay tuned for more on get­ting engaged and the wed­ding plan­ning process!

Love,

As always, thanks for read­ing! Has any­thing you want to cel­e­brate hap­pened late­ly? Sound off in the com­ments below!