Our New Home
I’m not even sure where to begin with this story. I’m so behind on blogging and it makes me sad but I’m determined to keep trying to keep this record of memories for our family. I’m typing this on my phone as I rock Moses to sleep, because I can never seem to find time to sit down with the laptop these days, always something else pressing to do. So forgive any typos, it may actually be better or worse than my usual postt try a due to autocorrect on my phone.
So anyways, where to begin. I’d say as early as late 2021 I started getting the itch for us to move. Between the pandemic and losing my dad, I was just ready for some big life changes. Maybe partly to escape the hard things I was going through, but that’s really when I began desiring and dreaming for us to have land and a homestead and live closer to the earth and to nature, it was a big dream and I wasn’t sure it could ever even really happen.
Leland and I casually started looking at houses. Land in Texas and Missouri was cheap, but Leland was still tied to his job in Salt Lake City. He was working in the office three days a week and from home two days a week. We looked a tiny bit at out of state jobs or remote jobs but his career is so specialized there really isn’t much out there, plus Leland loved his job and didn’t want to switch companies.
One day in April 2022 I was looking through listings and found a house on 1 acre only a mile from our house. It seemed way out of our budget, very expensive compared to similar houses in other states. I sent it to Leland saying “Look if we stay in Utah this is going to be the best we can find.” However, soon after I sent it I felt the Spirit whisper to me “You need to go look at that house”. So I told Leland I wanted to, just to look, of course! My sister gave me the number of her realtor and I took the girls with me to go see it. It was a beautiful little house! I loved it and especially loved the acre it came with. However, the housing market at the time was red hot. Our realtor explained we would have to make an offer immediately, well above asking price, and have our own house ready to go on the market in 24 hours, and after that we would probably still have to go into a bidding war to even have a chance at getting it. It seemed way too much too soon, so although I did love the house and the location we didn’t pursue it at all. We told our realtor where we were at that we didn’t want to buy a house if it was going to be THAT crazy.
Several months passed and it was a hard waiting season for me. We had our little foster love, Orion, and we didn’t know if he was going to be adopted by us or not. He ended up leaving in July but I still didn’t feel like it was the right time to move. After much prayer and seeking I got the answer that something was going to happen to make it easier for us to move and I would know when the time was right.
Finally in August 2022, Leland’s work announced that he could work remotely full time! I felt like this was the big something we’d been waiting for, Leland wasn’t so sure. Since it was a new policy, Leland’s work was still working out the details and didn’t have very many answers to our questions about where we could live or if Leland would still be needed in the office from time to time.
By the time September came around I had worked on Leland enough to have him convinced now was the time. We decided to put it our house on the market and see what came of it. We decided to stay in Utah,,within a 2 hour radius of SLC. Many factors played into this decision, Leland’s job, being close to family, foster care, and mostly the fact that it was what felt best. Still I mourned my dream a little bit, I knew there would be no 20 acres with a stream going through it in the budget for us in Utah. Nevertheless we were excited and had fun looking at houses (in the beginning).
Late September 2022 we had found a few houses we were interested in seeing. One was a very big old craftsman style home, in a tiny town I had never heard of, and it was way out of our budget. I kept my eye on it and a couple weeks later they lowered the price. Still out of our budget but I convinced Leland and our realtor we should go see it. After all it was on the way to another one we were seeing.
As we were walking through it, I knew. This was our house. This was going to be it. Leland was very skeptical but I told him to just wait, maybe they would lower the price again, but somehow it would all work out.
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| Screenshot from the house listing |
Well a few weeks passed and we got our house on the market and...crickets... We had an open house in mid October and NO ONE CAME. The market was turning, interest rates were increasing, and the housing market was slowing waaaaay down. Still we were hopeful that instead of our house selling in days or a week it might be a few weeks and we were fine with that.
Leland and I visited the temple during this time and we felt like we should put an offer on the house I felt was the one. It was turning into a buyers market and this house has been on the market for months, so we decided to give them a low ball offer and the worst they could do was say no. Well, they countered back pretty steeply, and after a few days of countering back and forth, we got the house! We were officially under contract at the end of October, contingent on our house selling within 6 weeks.
We went back to the house for the inspection in November. It was so beautiful, I loved it! The inspection went well for a house so old, it had been well taken care of, but there were a few things we found that we didn't love, mainly bad smells from pets and cigarette smoke.
All this time our house was still on the market, having lots of showings, but no offers. I still had faith that things would work out and we would get an offer in time. Early December came around and we were nearing the deadline for selling our house else we wouldn't be able to get this one. We even did get an offer in December but it immediately fell through. We kept lowering the price we were selling our house for in order to get it to sell. We did get a lot of showings, but no lasting offers. Leland and I both started to feel uneasy about buying this house. It was already out of our budget to begin with, and now we had to keep lowering the price for our house. I knew that withdrawing our offer and ending our contract to buy it was the right choice, but I was so confused. Wasn't this house supposed to be the one? Did I just make that up? I knew I hadn't, but I didn't know what was going on. What was God's plan for us and why was he taking us on so many twists and turns?
In January we lowered our price again, and we renewed our house search again. We decided that this time we would not go under contract to buy a house until our house was under contract to sell. We did finally get a real offer in January! We accepted and it seemed like all was actually going to go through after the two withdrawn offers we had earlier. A few days passed and now the house hunt was really on because the countdown had begun until we had to be out of our house. We did not want to be between houses/homeless with 5 kids, 2 cats and 5 chickens!
We spent one weekend going to see several houses. We liked them but they were either too small, too far away, or sold before we could get an offer in. None of them felt right and we were starting to get worried. There were not many options on the market and I was afraid we would end up in a house in the suburbs on a .1 acre lot, my nightmare! (No offense to anyone who lives in the suburbs.)
About a week later we went to see a house we both really liked. It was only 10 minutes away, on a beautiful acre lot, a bit of a fixer upper, but very big. It was close to all of our friends and activities and I REALLY wanted it to work out. We were planning to make an offer on it but I told Leland I needed to walk through it one more time to be sure. The realtor and I went through it again, without the kids, and we found a lot of issues. Big things like roof problems and water damage, things we didn't notice the first time through with all the kids (this house had stuff EVERYWHERE and keeping the kids from touching anything had 90% of my attention). The realtor reached out to the seller about fixing these issues or considerably lowering the price and they were firm on the price and refused to fix anything. That was hard to hear and as much as I really wanted that house we knew that it was not a good idea to get into that mess.
Right at the same time, the seller of this house (the one) reached out to our realtor and said hey, we saw that your client's home is now under contract would they still be interested in buying our house? Of course this house had never left my mind, I still loved it more than any of the other houses we ever looked at. But it was still out of our price range. But we were out of any better options so we started negotiating with them again. They told us they could sell off some of the land separately, allowing us to buy the house and the remaining land for way less than what we had been under contract to buy it for before. We said yes to that and suddenly we were getting this house! I couldn't believe it!
The weeks passed and everything went through, seamlessly this time. We closed on the house on Valentines Day 2023 and moved in a few weeks later.
I could say a lot about the moving process. We had over 50 showings during the 4 months our house was on the market. It was such a stressful time! I learned how to speed clean a 2000 sq ft house in under an hour and it was not easy! We also found out I was pregnant mid-October so almost all of this was on top of my first trimester of pregnancy. But somehow we made it! Moving day we had so many amazing friends, family and church members from both houses come to help and I was just so grateful. When I loaded all our kids, cats and chickens up into our big van and drove away from our little Roy house for the last time I felt sadness, relief and a sense of rightness. When we pulled up to this house and I saw about 20 strangers from our new church, all here to help us move in, I felt so thankful.
This house is so beautiful and big. It feels like too much for us sometimes. But I'm so grateful to be here. We are all so happy here with so much space inside and out. We live in a cute little small town that has been very welcoming and feels so much safer than where we used to live. The kids have more freedom and fun here and I think we are all thriving.
The moving process was SO difficult, but it taught me a lot about faith and trusting in God's plan. The kids learned important lessons about how sometimes the Lord doesn't answer our prayers right away because he has something better in store for us. This house doesn't have everything I ever wanted, but it is big and surrounded by land that maybe we could buy someday, and it just feels right.
And now for more pictures of the house! It was built in 1928 and has so much history and character. I really love it so much. The kids and I decided to name it Lilac House because of the many lilac bushes on the property and the main bathroom wallpapered with Lilacs.
To see more about the previous places we've lived check out this post.
What a wonderful story! Your new house is so lovely I'm sure you and your family are going to make many many happy memories there. I definitely have house envy, especially of your kitchen ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe kitchen was the part I loved best too! We hope we can stay here for many years and not have to do the moving process again anytime soon.
DeleteI was scrolling through some old blog posts of mine last night and came across a comment from you—which lead me here. It made me happy seeing this faithful, growing little family! And I loved reading the story of your move—and seeing it all worked out. We are currently in the middle of just such a move—with a house still not sold and a million steps to finish getting things cleaned out and so on. It felt encouraging to be reading a story of someone on the opposite end of that seeing how things did indeed come together!
ReplyDeleteIt was a trial and a test of our patience but it did work out! Even better than we had planned for ourselves in the end. I have been following your moving story too! One of the houses we put an offer on was the old LDS church building in Young Ward that had been turned into a house. It would have been a very fun place to live but ultimately they accepted someone else’s offer instead of ours. I hope your house sells soon and your moving/house building can be as stress free as possible!
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