One year ago today, we closed on our first home.

That means it’s only been 365 days since I meant to write this post! But hey – what’s that old saying? Time flies when you’re going to Home Goods every other day, repainting all your rooms historically accurate colors from the Benjamin Moore Colonial Williamsburg collection, and getting excited at the thought of one day owning a power washer. Or is that just me?

But in all seriousness, after thirteen years and three very tiny apartments together, I don’t know if I ever truly thought this day would come. Owning a home seemed like this very unattainable goal that everyone around us seemed to be coming into with great ease. I know that a lot of that is social media and perception, and obviously, everyone’s situation is different, but sometimes it felt like this was never going to happen for us. For eight months, we spent almost every weekend going to open houses and showings and just being completely frustrated by what was out there in our price range. Our poor realtor always had a smile on her face when she saw us, but I very clearly remember saying to her one day “do you normally work with people for this long?” and she nicely said, “not this long usually…” 😂

And then it happened. I was sitting down to lunch one day with my mom and sister at a Mexican restaurant after we had spent the morning looking at linens for my sister’s wedding. I remember Steve said we should go to more open houses, and I begged and pleaded to be let out of house-hunter jail for a bit to do something, anything else because it had started to just completely consume our lives. He called me as I feverishly consumed chips and salsa at 11:15 A.M. (hey, they don’t have Mexican food on Nantucket, I was in withdrawal) and told me that he had just left an open house in… Rhode Island.

We had briefly looked at another house or two in the Ocean State, but I never thought we would seriously live there. “I really like this house,” he said, as I continued to devour what essentially became a brunch quesadilla (I mean, it’s noon somewhere, amirite?) and he rattled off the factoids: built in 1926 by a doctor, white with black shutters, recently flipped but had lots of original elements, and… tons of closet space. My spidey senses tingled. How could it be? A historic house with character + charm + storage solutions AND in our price range?! It didn’t seem possible.

“I really want you to come back here with me tomorrow,” he said and I wiped the salt and queso off my hands. I had trained myself at this point not to get overly excited about anything. In eight long months of searching, we had only put one offer in on a home that ended up having over fifty offers because it was drastically underpriced.

We drove down to Cumberland, RI the next day, bright and early so that we would be among the first people there for the open house. One of the things I hated the most about the house hunting process was the constant competition with eight zillion other people that look/think/talk exactly like you, especially where we were looking in Massachusetts. It just truly seemed like there was not enough to go around, and like we were all secretly fighting over these tiny little plots of land and second floors that Steve couldn’t even stand up straight in without whacking his head on ceiling tiles (yes, tiles). I’m not a confrontations person, and only competitive when it comes to really important things, like bowling or showbiz trivia, so having polite staredowns every weekend with other potential buyers while consuming tiny water bottles and crumby granola bars wasn’t exactly how I enjoyed spending my time.

Driving there, I remember thinking I don’t know what this house looks like, but I really don’t think I want to live in Rhode Island. And of course, the joke was on me, because when we arrived at the house, it was truly almost everything we could have wanted. Sure, it didn’t have central air (this doctor was ahead of his time with some things but I’m imagining that having a consistent stream of cool air running through your home was up there with flying cars in 1926) and it only had a one-car garage, but after you’ve lived with your spouse and dog in a one-room studio apartment, I felt like Annie the first time she enters Daddy Warbucks’ mansion.

I mean truly, no house is perfect, but there were just so many things we loved about it that we knew we needed to act on it. As we were exploring the upstairs (two floors?!?! gasp) I tried to gauge our realtor’s true feelings once we were out of earshot of the seller. “You guys are crazy if you don’t buy this house,” she muttered under her breath. We felt the same way, so that night we went back to Steve’s high school bedroom in his parent’s house that we had been shacking up in for the better half of a year and listed out our pros and cons. Eventually, we decided to make the offer, and shortly after, we got the call that it was accepted. After that, everything seemed to just move very quickly and go much faster than I anticipated. Maybe because there was so much build up, I assumed something had to go wrong. And yeah, there were a couple of little snafus here and there mostly centered around paperwork (like when Steve realized he had signed a bunch of legally binding documents with different versions of his name), but when we arrived at the real estate agent’s office on July 9, 2018, it actually happened. Like they gave us keys and everything.

And then, the real work began. But that’s another post (or twenty) for a different day. There’s so much that we want to do to our house to make it even more like the place we always dreamed of living. Don’t get me wrong – there truly is nothing “wrong” with it and everything about this home is completely livable (with the exception of a few paint color choices that the owner made in the flipping process that make absolutely no sense to me). We’re suffering from a case of handy husband + Pinterest obsessed wife ÷ lack of funds due to dropping the largest chunk of change in one fell sweep × the number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year… you get where I’m going this.

Truly, I’m not complaining and I can’t wait to show lots of before and afters of what we’re working on around here. While it’s taken me a bit to share more about the house on my blog, you can follow our most up-to-date progress on my Instagram (check out my story highlights for some of the projects we’ve already started tackling). But before we do that, please enjoy a small photoshoot that I made Steve and Schoon humor me with on the day we bought the house. I blame the internet.

There is so, so much more to share but I think this is enough all that my wannabe-HGTV self can handle for now. Let me know what kind of updates you most want to see! Me personally, that blue hallway would be my top choice but it seems like there are many other priorities on the list ahead of it, so it shall wait…

Domestically yours,

~L