Today we are homeowners.

Definitely not a word I thought we'd be able to use to describe ourselves six months ago! It was quite a surprise to me when Brandon proved (using MATH) back in January that with the right house, we could buy a home in San Diego and our monthly mortgage payment would be basically the same as what we pay now in rent (actually, we'll be paying about $10 less). It blew my mind! Hooray for low interest rates.

So today we closed escrow on our new home, [address redacted because this is the internet and I am not a moron]. It's so cute! It's a flip property, meaning one that was purchased as a foreclosure and completely fixed up to sell for profit. The seller did a great job, adding three big rooms on the back of a formerly bitty little house (our large guest room, living room, and master bedroom.) The house is nearly 1700 square feet, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. There's a small backyard (used to be bigger before they added all the new rooms but plenty big enough for Lucas to roam around), as well as a wide cement side yard that we'll use as a patio. There's a quirky two-sided fireplace dividing the kitchen and dining room/piano room, and a beautiful exposed wood ceiling in the living room. An extremely exciting bonus for me is the his-and-hers closets in the master bedroom -- mine is a walk-in! This is big news for the kind of houses we were looking at and could afford. My clothes are barely going to fill half of it -- for now, haha. Also, the seller put in extra-tall counters in the kitchen and master bathroom for whatever reason, which is perfect for us. Sorry, future short house guests (Mom). And the windows are all HUGE, which I love!

We're also about five houses away from a public elementary school that looks decent enough for Lucas to attend, if we decide to go that route. The middle school and high school it feeds into are atrocious, but we figure we have ten years to find a solution to that problem. The neighborhood is okay, not much better or worse than where we live now. There is a police station quite close, and we'll be getting a security system. Hey, if we could afford Poway, we would have bought a house in Poway. This will work perfectly for us right now, and we're very pleased with it.

The house is such a blessing! It's a pretty tough market for buyers in San Diego right now. We must have looked at nearly 30 houses, and put in seven offers before one worked out. It wasn't our first choice house, to be honest, but looking at the process now, it seems clear to us that this is the perfect house. I've been telling people, the process was so easy from the time we found this house, it's like God put a blinking red arrow over the top of it - "This one! This one!" We even got the house for $5k under the asking price, when we were offering up to $10k over for other houses and still getting outbid.

The movers are coming next Friday, and we're headed out to buy a few necessary items (refrigerator, window coverings, etc.) this weekend. I've been doing my best to pack while Brandon is at work, challenging when you have a 10-month-old pulling out everything from the box that you manage to put in it. But we're getting there! I can't wait to start getting settled in the new place.

Photos to come, of course! Brandon may have some I can add in here later.