In the beginning....

Everything about buying this house has happened so very fast. 

I can almost pin point the moment we decided to just go for it, but only barley; it flew so fast it's practically all a blur. 

We have been renting houses/apartments for the past 4.5 years. Renting definitely has its pros and cons, but we were starting to run out of appreciation for all the pros of renting....Instead, we were tired of feeling like we were just throwing away money every month, when we could be investing it into our own property. And we were tired of not having any control over the place we lived: having to ask permission/not being able to: hang pictures, cut back a tree, paint walls, change the lighting, and even to have a pet cat, etc. etc.

So it was almost an impulse of "Can we do it?" "Yeah, let's do it!" In a matter of days we found a great lending company & Realtor, both recommended by Andrew's sister and set up appointments to meet with them. 

We met with Stephanie, the Lender, and she gave us great news off the bat. We knew we were in a good position to buy and  just meeting with her made our goal to buy a house so much more real! We had a real idea of what money we need for a down payment, and other things we needed to make this happen! 

I started scouring the Zillow for houses that were currently for sale, finding the few gems that I thought were worth taking a look at!  

When we first met with our realtor, Joe, he helped us to visualize & also qualify the specifics of what we really wanted in a house, and of those wants/needs, which were the priorities. This was extremely helpful! Mostly because Andrew & I were able to express our priorities to each other so that we knew what was important to ourselves, and each other. This was so helpful even when looking at houses online (you know, the weeding out process.) 

He then took us to view the first house on our view list; the house that would soon become our home.