Welcome home, Bradys!: All Things Brady

It only seems appropriate to make my very first blog post about our brand new (to us) home. This home has been our most challenging and rewarding accomplishment to date as a family. It is also our most beloved refuge, a place where Matthew and I can finally call H O M E. We are looking forward to putting our personal touch on every aspect of our house-- and we definitely plan to do JUST that…all in good time. But first, I will give you a little insight into our home-buying process.

We bought our two-acre (farm)house on Friday, April 4^th, a mere three and half weeks after we submitted our preliminary offer! As some of you know, we scheduled a viewing of this house on a whim after finding it on Zillow and driving by it a few times. Five minutes into the viewing, Matthew and I briefly glanced at each other, smiled, and shared "that look"-- we both knew this was the house for us. The house and property provided plenty of room to grow a family, a large fenced yard for our growing pup and an abundance of space and privacy, unlike all of the cookie-cutter neighborhoods that, frankly, consume the majority of our town. Also, the house is technically located in Eastover, a quaint and fairly recently established town that is right outside of the Fayetteville city limits; the location was an important factor since crime was an issue we faced frequently while living within the city of Fayetteville. Who would have thought a military town would be so burdened with crime?!

We concluded the viewing of the house with the agreement that we would meet with our Realtor and look at it again a few days later, when we would begin formulating an offer. However, a few hours after we returned home from the viewing, we received a call from our Realtor with some potentially troubling news-- an offer had been submitted on the house during our viewing! We nearly panicked-- "how dare someone put an offer in on our home!" Based on the suggestion of our amazing Realtor, we submitted an offer we deemed to be competitive; it's safe to say we were v e r y motivated to secure this house and beat the opposing offer. [Fun-- or downright crazy-- fact: we received the name of our Realtor from a friend and so impulsively scheduled the viewing that we hadn't even met with a mortgage company to get pre-qualified. When our Realtor called and we decided to submit an offer, Matthew and I had to get pre-qualified and approved for our loan all at once over the phone with a mortgage broker who works with our Realtor. At 8:00pm. On a Sunday night. Our home-buying team was i n c r e d i b l e, to say the least.]

Fast forward a few weeks and we are sitting in a conference room with our Realtor and a lawyer laughing as Matthew and I complain that our hands are cramping from signing our names one THOUSAND times. Y'all know how it is! With keys finally in hand, Matthew and I raced over to the new house and immediately started measuring, testing paint colors and drawing up renovation ideas. We were so excited and anxious to get started and to make this house our home.

I will be posting before & after shots of our projects inside the house in separate posts but here are a few outdoor shots of our home: