I had one stipulation. I didn’t want to look at any houses the two months before or after our little girl was born. We’ve renovated a house before and I did not want to add that stress to an already stressful (though joyous) season. If we didn’t find anything before November, we would wait until spring to start looking again. I should know by now not to be set in my own plans.
Start the search!
Two years ago we paid off the house we’re currently living in. As soon as we made that last payment, I started searching for something a little bigger.
Now don’t get me wrong, the house we’re in is great. It’s our first home. We finished renovating it the week we got married (two days before actually… Nothing like cutting things a little close!). We brought all three of our babies home to it. It’s held so many firsts and so very many memories. It will always be very special to me.
Our house had one problem…
We were quickly outgrowing this two bedroom house with exactly one closet in it.
We knew we wanted to grow our family, but we also needed a little more space. I stayed home with our little ones and some days I felt like the walls were closing in. I’d take them outside to escape and be frustrated once again because our yard was so small.
Decluttering helped, but what we really needed was more room to spread out and play! At the top of our wish list was a big yard, a few extra closets, and enough room to have our families over without everyone sitting on top of each other. Simple enough requests, but it proved harder to find than we expected.
Two years later, we were still looking. We found lots of houses we liked… we even got close to purchasing a couple of them, but it was never quite right. I (impatiently) agreed we should take our time and wait until just the right place came along because we really liked not having a house payment. We kept looking, but just couldn’t find anything that was worth adding that payment back in to our budget.
Wait, wait, and wait some more!
We continued to save and I checked the house listings almost every morning to see if something new had come up. During that time, I got pregnant with our third child and felt even more pressure to find something, but it still wasn’t happening.
I had an incredibly rough pregnancy and we decided it was time to take a break from house hunting and just focus on our family for a few months.
For the first time in nearly two years, we stopped looking for a new house. I stopped checking the listings. I drove on by when I saw a new “for sale” sign in a yard. I was done.
I prepared to bring our little girl home to the house we already had. I had accepted that God wasn’t ready for us to move yet.
Then two weeks after we stopped looking, somebody mentioned to Jack that they knew of a house that we really needed to look at. From what he was told, it sounded like it had almost everything we wanted and was in our price range. He was very excited about it. I was not.
I had been put on modified bed rest and almost refused to go see it… actually at first I did refuse to go see it. I didn’t want to change the plans I’d made. Not now. Not after waiting for two years. I was done looking. We were staying where we were. However, Jack (as he often does) convinced me to step away from my perfectly laid out plans and give it a chance.
God’s plans are greater than my own.
From the moment I stepped through the front door, I knew it was exactly what we were looking for. It was structurally sound (a block house… an enneagram 6’s dream house!), had big windows with lots of natural light, the potential to have an open floor plan, storage space, and the icing on the cake was a huge yard for the kids!
It definitely needed some updating (check out that carpet!), but we could handle it… and by we, I obviously mean Jack, our dads, and my grandpa… but I would be there for moral support and to keep everyone on budget.
So here we were, weeks away from having a baby, the exact time I said we were NOT going to buy a house… buying a house. We placed an offer and they accepted it the day after our third baby was born. Eight weeks later, the house was ours!
We now have a newborn and a new house… And yet another lesson in trusting God’s timing over my own. Since Jack can only work on it on the weekend, it’ll still be a few months until the house is ready for us to move in so I’ll have plenty of practice trusting in His timing when I feel like we’re busting at the seams in our current house!
As it turns out, searching Pinterest for house renovation ideas is a good way to stay awake during those many middle-of-the-night nursing sessions!
I look forward to bringing you along on this journey!
I’d love to hear from you too! What are your top must-haves if you were able to completely renovate your home? Are you more of a DIY person or would you rather have someone else do the work?
Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/alittlemooregrace/ if you want to see more pictures of the process!
