Hi friends! After a ridiculously long blog hiatus, I’m back! It’s been a crazy 2021 so far for my little family, and I’m so grateful that we’re almost back to some normalcy!
PS-the image for this blog post is a stock image and is not our old or our new house! 😉 But once we close, I’ll post pictures!!
We spent January preparing to sell our house, and it went on the market early February. We showed it for a few days, and BAM! Sold. So then it was time to prepare to move. We closed/moved out early March, and since we didn’t have a new house, we rented an Airbnb. And since that time, we’ve been living in an Airbnb. After weeks of offering on houses in this INSANE housing market, we’ve finally found our new dream home. And crazy enough, it isn’t anything like what I’d have told you was my dream house when this whole “let’s sell our house!” thing started. As of right now, we’re supposed to move into our new house early May. We cannot wait!!
Why the update? Well, in these past few months, I’ve had to stretch and be challenged. And in that, I have grown. But to share the growth with you, you had to have some background on the craziness that has been our life.
I wouldn’t have thought that selling/buying a house would give me so many “life lessons,” but here we are.
1.You can handle so much more than you think.
Today, we’re talking in the context of houses, but this applies to so many life circumstances. We truly are so much stronger than we know. It was very stressful for me as a “planner” to not have a plan in place, the next house lined up, to not have all my stuff since almost everything is currently in storage. We’ve had a tough time mentally through this experience, with everything being up in the air and with losing out on house after house for weeks in a row. It felt like we were always at a standstill and a breaking point. Even still, we’d be sad about not getting a house, recover, and a few days later it’d be on to the next house. So many of us don’t give ourselves the credit we deserve for being able to keep on going when things aren’t going well.
2. When one door closes, another one opens.
We’ve all heard the saying so many times. We’ve seen the truth of it play out over and over in our lives. But somehow, it’s hard to remember when you are in the midst of something hard. This saying makes me giggle a bit in the context of house-hunting because when one door closed, LITERALLY another one opened. 🙂 And kept closing/opening until it was the right door. Some weeks in this market, we’d think, “this week will be the week we won’t even get to look at a house because nothing is popping up.” And yet somehow, every week there was something to look at (and almost every week, something to offer on!).
3. You are allowed to change your mind.
I think we forget this one so much!! But we really can change our minds. It’s funny, because at the beginning of this experience, I wanted a much newer, HGTV style, open concept home. I wanted a 2 car garage (because our old house didn’t have a garage at all). I had all these ideas in mind. But when the market changed the second we sold our house and prices skyrocketed, it became clear we’d need to make a few tweaks to what the new house would be. And at the end of all of it? I didn’t “settle” on something less than what I wanted…we ended up finding the perfect home that we never even knew we wanted! We ended up buying a house about as old as our old house, and…get this…we bought it one street over from our old house. At the beginning, I said I didn’t want to stay in the same neighborhood…but when we went to see that house, it just felt like HOME. After all the house losses we had (5 I think?), we ended up with a house that will work so much better for us than any of the other homes we were sad about losing.
4. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.
Meant to Be by Bebe Rexha feat Florida Georgia Line has been our family anthem throughout these past few months. Brandon and I often break out into an amazing rendition of the chorus of the song to remind ourselves that it’s all going to work out. It’s not easy to remember when you’re stressed, but truly, at the end of this house journey, we know we’ve come full circle. And I believe that is how life works too.
5. There are good moments even during hard times.
I know this one may not be true for everyone and in all circumstances, but my guess is that there are good moments in most hard times. There are still smiles, laughs, moments spent with loved ones, the sun shining on a beautiful spring day. Our family has so much to be thankful for during these past few months. A cozy place to stay, family to lean on, Brandon’s mom coming to visit, my sister and her boyfriend coming to visit, family dinners at my mom and step dad’s, family walks, a new park the kids love, a new fave coffee place…there are just a lot of bright spots even as I struggled to feel my best (or even decent, if I’m being honest) for much of the the past few months. I am so blessed.
