Tales of a First-Time Home Buyer: Livin' the Dream

We have been living in our new house for almost four months now. We are getting used to living here and we have settled into a nice routine. We love the house; it is everything hoped it would be. The problem is that we are beginning to take it for granted. Now that our lives have transitioned almost completely to being homeowners, we find ourselves thinking and worrying about other things, even though just a few short months ago the house completely consumed every aspect of our lives.

We were reminiscing last Saturday when we were out to dinner. Think how far we have come in such a short amount of time…In December when my wife started her new job we weren’t even thinking about buying a home. As far as I was concerned I could have lived at our apartment for another year. I loved that apartment. Then after a pep talk from my Uncle Rich at Christmas time while we were visiting my parents in Florida, I investigated possibly buying a house. It wasn’t until mid-January that we decided to go for it. By mid-February we had signed on the dotted line and by mid-March the house was already under construction. June came just as quickly and we moved in. And now here we are.

Living in the apartment seems so long ago. We were different people then. I won’t lie; I didn’t even really know how a mortgage worked, I didn’t know anything about escrow, and frankly, I didn’t care to know. I had to learn everything on my own, with a few calls for advice to my dad of course. We used to look ahead to the move with fear and worry, now we look back at it as… well, just another obstacle that had to be overcome. All the meetings with the mortgage guy, all the saving, scrounging, frugality…our lives were tailored to meeting these requirements, these necessary plateaus if we wanted to be homeowners. Now we just are.

It was the perfect storm for us. We didn’t know what we were doing, we weren’t sure if we could do it, we didn’t know how to do it, we didn’t know what to expect, and we didn’t have the know-how to even know what to expect. But we educated ourselves. We powered through it. We crafted a plan and we stuck to it.

We talked about how it was the single greatest achievement of both of our lives. We agreed it was harder than graduating college. Go to class, do your homework, study for tests, you can graduate. If you do all those things, it’s difficult NOT to graduate. But there’s no formula for buying a home. It’s different for everyone. We made up our own formula. The way we did it may not be the way others have done it in the past, but it worked for us. And we are better people for it.

My point is that the last thing we should be doing is taking the house for granted. Like I said, it’s the product of the greatest achievement of our lives. It is the symbol of all the sacrifices, all the decisions, and the hard work that we have done. It represents us. Before we moved in, we would talk about all the little things that we would do, the everyday stuff that we were looking forward to. For me, it was lounging on our new couch, watching my giant TV, sipping a cold beer. For my wife, it was simultaneously utilizing her new double ovens, running on our neighborhood running path, and decorating. We now do all of those things. Instead of worrying about work, money, or traffic, we should be enjoying the little things that we used to dream about that are now a reality.

After our reminisce session, the next day I watched football all day on the couch and drank some beers while my wife went running and baked cookies. We really are livin’ the dream.