Today marks three weeks of living in our new house, so I finally feel like I can take a seat and share a little bit more about our journey.

Firstly, before buying this house, we’d been renting for the past 5.5 years and before that we both lived with our parents. We’ve had some really strict rentals and we’ve had some wherein we were free to do whatever we wanted. We’ve moved a lot and have split the past few years between 5 different rentals, not including living with Collin’s sister Stacy for a few months here and there as we were in between spots waiting on our leases to start. The longest we spent at a rental was at our last house, which was exactly two years.

From the moment we got to Nashville, we were advised to meet with a real estate agent who was a family friend. We learned through meeting with him and a lender that we were basically nowhere near ready financially to buy a home! We had been running Blissbranch for about a year and a half and though we were making money, we didn’t have long enough of employment history for that to be considered stable. My credit was also jacked up from student debt and Collin had zero credit. So yeah — NOT READY! Hahah.

We spent the next two years working hard on our income but our credit was harder to fix. We both were working full-time jobs here in Nashville which were new to us at the time and we checked back in with a realtor and a lender. We were advised to keep working on things for another year or so.

I got pregnant with Phoenix and we moved again to a rental that was so affordable and they offered us money off our rent to improve the property. I asked if we could sign a two year lease at the current monthly rate so that we could focus on having the baby and working on our credit. We weren’t hoping that once we left that house, we wouldn’t have to rent again.

By chance, our real estate agent emailed me thinking of us and Phoenix, just checking in and giving me some info of a new lender she was working with. I reached out and made an appointment with that lender a few months later (in February 2019), and once we met we found out we were finally approved for an loan and could start shopping for a home.

We looked at over 20 homes before we found this house. It was actually SO fun to see so many different styles of homes, sizes, and locations in our price range. Nashville is pretty competitive, so we did write a few offers that were declined. We were even under contract on a different house that had a terrible inspection and we couldn’t get the owners to promise to pull permits for the repairs (they wanted to use unlicensed repairmen), so we bailed. It felt like a waste of time and money but I’m so glad we bailed.

We found this 3 bed room 2 bath 1800 square-foot home in an area that was completely new to us (Hermitage/Donelson area of Nashville) and we just knew when we walked in. It was at the tippy top of our price range but it had been on the market for almost 200 days and wasn’t recently inhabited but remodeled by investors. The inspection on the home was great, and what little things were concerning were addressed and fixed before we moved in.

We did have some slip-ups at the last minute and our loan had to be changed from FHA to conventional, but we ended up coming out on top with this switch.

Closing was so so hectic and the date kept getting changed, hiccups kept coming up, but finally closing day came! It was the most stressful day of the entire journey, and our lawyers almost missed the wire transfer time which would put us with a full U-Haul and nowhere to stay until the following week (our rental was no longer ours). However, we were able to hand them all of our checks, sign everything, and everything was funded in time.

Here’s what our home looked like before we moved in, plus some photos from our journey.

This is a selfie that we took when we first viewed the house. We knew we wanted to make an offer!

This is our dining room + bonus living space

Our living room, where the big window is that I always post.

I had to do the final walkthrough solo since we bought our home from Opendoor, not a realtor or independent owner and our realtor was in Europe.

Anyway, I’ll share our plans for the home in a separate post but I wanted to share a bit about our journey and some of the listing pics from this house in a dedicated post, since that was so much of the journey. It’s such an amazing opportunity to buy a home but it was not without its challenges!

We Bought a House!