Finally Home

It's been several years since I felt like I was at a place where I was going to really settle down. Although, yes, I went to college in my hometown right down the street from my childhood home, I was packing up and moving at least every eight months between the dorms, coming home for breaks, summer internships, and moving into apartments. It felt like no matter where I was currently living, I really couldn't get too comfortable because I knew soon I'd be dragging out the boxes again for another cumbersome move across town. 

When Ian and I moved to Virginia, we knew this was somewhere we wanted to make our long-term home. While we couldn't have asked for a better living situation for our first apartment together, we knew that one of our first goals as married folks was to buy a house as soon as possible. I won't lie to you, when we were first married the whole idea of buying a house was so not appealing to me. That was something that old people did, and I sure wasn't anywhere ready to be old. Because once you bought a house, you had to have kids. That's just the way it worked.

But then I started watching HGTV. Ha, just kidding. No, but really. The thought of owning our own building actually seemed pretty cool. A place with multiple rooms and levels. A place that we could paint and alter any way we wanted. Soon we had friends who had homes (and with no baby plans in the future) and suddenly I wanted one too! Once we took care of paying off student loan debt first, we started to seriously put some money aside each month for a down payment while starting to look around at houses in the area.

After many months of saving, trying to limit excessive dining out, and some help from the family, we finally found a place that we loved and was right in our budget. While the idea of a fixer-upper sounded like a lot of fun, we moved into a place that is already in fantastic shape yet still has some room for us to customize to our tastes. It's going to be a process to make this house our home, but I am so thrilled to finally know that we are settled down. Ugh, "settled down" just sounds so old, doesn't it?

Whatever. I finally feel like I'm home!