Carlos and I made a pact that by the end of our first year of marriage, we would own our first home.
November came around and we decided we were ready. Our apartment lease was soon to expire in a few months and we just felt like God was calling us both towards this next step. We never EVER thought in a million years that we would be calling Kingwood, Texas our home. Trust me, when my brother moved out to the area years before, we always complained about going to his house and wondering why any person with reasonable sense would live out here. (Note: Never Say Never) We truly did not imagine that this is the community where we would find our home church and want to establish and raise our family.
We had the wonderful help of my younger sisters' stepmother helping us in the process as our realtor. She was pretty amazing guiding us through the process and driving from Sugar Land to Kingwood on weekends to show us homes. We knew we wanted to stay within a certain neighborhood, and so we did what we felt was right - we prayed about it! We actually wrote a list of what we ideally wanted in our first home:
Neighborhood - Trailwood Village or Bear Branch
Budget - $$$ (We actually went to our max offer price - won against 5 other bidders AND in the end of closing on the house, we walked away with it for under asking price - and people say God isn't real???)
One Story Home
Symmetrical Front of House
4 bedrooms
2.5 baths
Either move-in ready and the opportunity to make it to our liking ourselves
And we trusted that God would show up and bring us to the right home! AND boy did He show up! But, honestly it took a lot of patience and trusting in His will for us. We tried to find homes we thought were "perfect" and tried to make them fit into that list we had made. We would make offers on homes that didn't have any checkmarks from the list, but we thought we loved. Of course, we ended up losing the offers on those homes because the market is super competitive right now for buyers.
We were coming up on the week we had to move out of our apartment. We decided to just wait and continue to look - luckily, we had amazing friends who allowed us to use their home in the meantime until we found "the" home for us. Little did we know what was literally right around the corner...we moved out on a Thursday, and early that following Saturday morning, I went browsing for the umpteenth million time on HAR to see if any homes had recently popped up. And THAT is when I saw our home...well not really. It was such a new listing, that there were no pictures or description. I GoogleMap'd it to see a front view of the home, and immediately texted Carlos that we needed to go look at this home ASAP! We called Karen, our realtor, and she arranged for a showing in-between 5 other showings. EEEK!
When we went to see the house that afternoon, Carlos and I immediately fell in love. Let me know, we both know and sense a good thing when we look at each other and don't even have to say a word - this is how we typically make decisions (because it's such a great method to use lol) and this was one of those times. Despite the horrible 1970s wallpaper, original shag carpets, and endless walls of wood paneling (oh I'll post the pictures)...we saw the endless possibilities of taking this home and making it into ours. We had other homes lined up to go look at after, and we didn't even want to bother. We wanted to get our offer in immediately because we knew this home wouldn't be around for long. Boy, were we right! There were 5 other offers within 24 hours!!! The owners were the original couple who bought the house in 1977, and were in their 80s. So what did we do to make sure we sealed the deal and had the best offer? Well, write them a personal and touching letter of course!!!
Well it worked!!! We really connected with the previous owners and God continued to work so many miracles throughout the closing process that allowed us to make our first home everything we wanted and more. Stay tuned as we renovate our first home!!!
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