Now that it’s “officially official,” I’m happy to share that we sold our first home! We listed our home this past summer and were fortunate to sell quickly to an out of town family who allowed us to lease back until November while we finish building our NEW HOME! While I am so sad to leave our first home and all of the wonderful memories created there, I am beyond excited for the opportunities this new home provides our family.
Selling our home was quite the experience. We luckily used a realtor we knew and trusted who guided us through the process. But keeping your home pristine for showings at a moment's notice is something I never want to do again. To say it was a challenge with a 1 year old, a 3 year old, and a dog is an understatement. I commend anyone who has been in a similar position--it was not easy!!! There were moments where we were racing to put away toys/dishes/signs of life and the kids were taking out other toys even faster. But we got the hang of it and, again, I am SO thankful the house sold within a couple of weeks so this part of the process didn't drag on and on.
Of course with moving comes the packing and the purging. And, I purged and donated quite a bit. I read a book called Soulful Simplicity (linked here) that has helped solidify my perspective on how I want to live and how I want to raise our kids. I have really been growing fond of the "simplicity" in everyday life. Capsule wardrobes. Montessori toys. Functional spaces. Experiences over things. Understanding that more does not equal more. I packed away a lot of the kids' toys before we started showing the house and discovered not only was there less mess because there were less things, but they knew where the toys were located and weren't dumping out baskets upon baskets of toys to find the one tiny blue racecar they were looking for. If you have toddlers, you know how this goes.
This idea of simplicity really helped as we were looking for our new home as we made our “must haves” list. In our old home we had a formal living and dining area that were never utilized to their potential. The formal living room was also a playroom which overflowed to everywhere else in the house. And the formal dining room—which was arguably my favorite room in the house—was really all for looks and not for function. We noticed that every time we hosted a party, people would congregate in the kitchen and around the island even though we had a beautiful formal dining room. So when we were looking for a new home, I really wanted more functional space for our family and our lifestyle. We had always loved the idea of a new construction home and when we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for in an existing home, we found a builder who had a project started that seemed to check off a lot of the boxes we were looking for.
In terms of logistics, the build has taken a little over a year and has had plenty of delays, as expected. Even with moving locally, there was still and endless to-do list to make all the pieces fit in place with the “timeline.” Ideally I would’ve loved to move directly from our old house to the new one but the timing just didn’t work out. So we are living in a rental nearby and have been able to check in on the progress a lot more often which has been fun to see everything we've envisioned come to life in the finishing stages. We are still a few weeks away from the house being complete so there's still a lot to be done, but we are in the home stretch! Building a home with all the finishes and selections that we like has been such a fun project to do together! It has been so fun to CREATE this space and I hope to share some photographs of the space and details as it is coming along. Most importantly, I'm looking forward to making it feel like HOME!
Thanks for reading :)
Kristen
