Our First House and What’s Next for our Family

It’s difficult to believe that five years have almost come and gone. It seems like just yesterday that Justin and I were handed the keys to our first home just two days before our wedding. Well, this season for our family is coming to an end and a new one is springing up! Our house is under contract and we are under contract on a new one! I definitely choked back tears watching the “For Sale” sign go up in the front yard. It’s hard to let go of a season that meant so much to me, to let go of a place that holds so many memories and is the physical location where so much transformation happened in my life. But God is teaching me that we need to let go of certain seasons in His timing so that He can give us something that is better for the next season. A closed fist can’t receive anything and great things never come from comfort zones. (If you can make it to the end of this post that’s where I share the story of selling the house and buying our new one).

Five years ago we fell in love with this little house on the hill. And five years later it looks a little different. We fenced in the back yard to make it safer for the boys and our pup.

When we moved in there were two large trees in the back yard and a jumbled mess of a concrete patio. Within the first month of us living here we were hit with a huge hurricane which took down one of the trees. Miraculously the tree landed perfectly UPHILL in between our shed and the neighbors. If it would have landed downhill it would have landed on the enclosed porch where we were sleeping. Thanks to family members we were able to remove the other tree, all of the concrete, and level out the back yard so it would be ready the following summer to install the fence. We couldn’t have done it all or afforded it all without the help of our family.

The room below has served many different functions. It started out as my office. Once Noah began crawling (read: unplugging my hard drives), we moved my office to the downstairs bedroom out of reach. This sweet sunny room now serves as the kids’ play room/mud room. Very appropriate for little boys I think. ;)

Oh the living room! It seemed like all the rooms were either too bright or too muddy. We had so much fun updating the paint colors and making this house more home-y.

I think the dining room transformation is my favorite! From the built ins to the window seat, my vintage-loving heart had so much fun with this space!

The kitchen is the mildest transformation because we couldn’t quite afford to replace these old cabinets or counter tops. But a fresh coat of paint made everything brighter, a blank slate for the new owners! Oh, and we finally added a dishwasher after not having one for four years!

The downstairs bedroom, which functioned as my office for the majority of the five years we lived here.

I apologize for the quality of some of these images that were taken five years ago! But, it’s just evidence of growth right?! lol

This is Noah’s bedroom. We wanted to make the room feel bigger and brighter so we ditched the dark colors in favor of neutral grays.

The larger of the two upstairs bedrooms was supposed to be the nursery. It ended up being our room and the nursery. We were a bit tight, but everything we needed fit into this little room and worked for us for the past few years. Justin and his dad did an amazing job updating this room!

This is what we fell in love with: the charming character of this 100 year old home that has the most beautiful view of the sunset over the mountains. One of my favorite things about living here has been the view and listening to the church bells chime on the hour and sing familiar old hymns that I grew up singing in church. It has been good for my heart.

So how did this all come to pass? We have been house hunting for just over two years and were beginning to get pretty discouraged that we’d never be able to afford a home the size and age we were looking for located out in the country. We stumbled across a house at Christmastime that we loved, however when we went to see it the property just wasn’t kid-friendly. So we sadly let that one go only to be surprised to find another one come back on the market in our price range just a few months ago. It had previously been under contract (which is why we didn’t see it listed at Christmas), but the contract fell through recently. The funny thing is that the owners are distant cousins of mine whose one daughter is my age. We met in middle school and I have memories there of our time together. :) I even went on a girls vacation with them one summer in high school! So prior to us going to see the house I kind of remembered what it was like and was unsure whether it would be a good fit for us. However, when we walked through I mentally counted up everything on our wish list and realized it had EVER SINGLE THING on our wish list… and more. Justin and I both felt like we were supposed to pursue it, but here’s the clincher: we had to sell our house before being able to put an offer on that one. Talk about scary! We could end up homeless with two kids in the middle of my busy work season! So we prayed. And miracles just started pouring out. First, our agent suggested we let the owners know that we were the ones interested since we knew them and just ask if they’d allow us to do a contingent offer. An offer contingent on the sale of our house is basically unheard of because of the type of sale that the owners had on their house. But we asked anyway. And within an hour or two I got a call back saying that they granted us a 45-day contingency window! WOW. I was blown away by God moving on our behalf to let us know that YES we were taking steps in the right direction and that He was going to provide in ALL ways and give us peace to keep following Him in this.

So the next step was to list our house. We hurried to get the house ready, finishing up projects we had been putting off and cleaning up. So we set a meeting with our agent to submit our offer to the sellers and while we were at that meeting I get a text from my cousin, Derek’s, fiance Rachel that they’d like to come see our house that night if it suited us. So I finished up photographing our house that afternoon just before Justin headed off to work and Rachel and Derek came over to check out our house. I can’t tell you how much fun I had showing them around and talking about features that I loved about the house and things that we wish we could’ve done before moving. I had been praying for the past year or so that God would provide the right buyers for our house and the perfect time, for us and them. When they left that night I genuinely did not expect anything from them because I didn’t want them to feel any pressure to choose our house over others just because we are family. But the next morning I woke up to a text from Rachel letting me know that they fell in love with our house and after sleeping on the decision, wanted to buy it from us! This part – Derek and Rachel’s story woven into ours has been the sweetest gift of this whole thing! I was seriously struggling with the idea of listing our house and having strangers walking through it, uprooting our lives for who knows how long, and potentially people buying it who wouldn’t care for it like we did. Us having no connection to the future owners to be able to enjoy and celebrate what their story holds during their season here. I didn’t even tell God any of that outright that I can remember, but He knew. And He romanced my heart all the more by abundantly blessing us in each of these ways. Only God can orchestrate stories to intertwine so perfectly. We are thrilled and full of joy to be handing this sweet home over to them soon and stepping into a new one for our family.

We are currently under contract with the new house and waiting to hear if our offer has been accepted. The story is still unfolding and we would appreciate any and all prayers that everything from here on out would flow just as smoothly as it has so far. We would love for things to move quicker than anticipated so that we can settle sooner on both houses to allow Rachel to not just move in on time, but ahead of schedule so they can do a few things to the house before she needs to move in.

I hope that if you’ve read our story that you can see God’s abundant goodness shining through! He’s not just a good provider, He loves to provide abundantly! I pray that your faith has grown in reading our story and that you would dare to ask Him to provide abundantly for you, too! I’m certain that the story He is writing for you will be perfect for you and surprise you in ways both big and small.