For my very first blog I think it makes the most sense to start from the beginning…
Jacoby and I lived in Chicago for two years, and we loved it. We have so many great memories of living in the city together. However, after we got married, we realized that when we planned to start a family it would be a real challenge for us financially and logistically. So we went ahead, bit the bullet and moved to the suburbs.
To sum it up… WE HATED IT. Very quickly, we soon realized that the burbs just weren’t for us. We’re two country kids at heart who grew up surrounded by cornfields. We thought that by moving out of the city meant moving away from traffic, noise and chaos. We found ourselves either driving back into the city for fun activities with friends or driving out to the country to be with our folks. We eventually decided that moving back home to where we both grew up was the right place for us to be.
Our decision to build our home didn’t happen on purpose. Quite honestly, we were set on buying a starter home. Neither my husband or myself had ever owned a home before, so it was our goal to find one that would work for a few years, and then we could figure out what we really wanted from there.
In January of 2016, we started our search for a new home. We found out that the market for houses in our area was SUPER COMPETITIVE. If was something good and decently priced, it was being snatched up in less than 24 hours. We were watching Realtor.com like hawks. If something came up, I was calling our realtor in a matter of minutes. Over a four month period, we made four different offers on four different homes. UGH! Two went to bidding wars, which we lost because we refused to overpay for what we were getting. For another house, our offer was accepted, but they wanted to be able to back out at any time before the close day. There was no way we were going to let that happen. For the final house we placed an offer on, it was accepted, and then during the ten day review period they pulled out. The seller thought they had a new job offer in Atlanta, but it turns out they didn’t. To say we were devastated would be an understatement.
With only two months left on our rental in the burbs, we had to decide what our next move would be. There was just nothing on the market that we felt good about purchasing at the time, so we came to the conclusion that building our home would be the best option. There was just one problem… we literally had no clue what we were doing. Sure, I’ve watched countless hours of HGTV, but that’s about the extent of my home building knowledge. My hubby was working with less than that.
In a future post, I plan to detail what we learned about the home building process and some valuable tips and tricks that we would have loved to know throughout the process. <- Post now available, just click to read. 🙂
In July 2016, we broke ground on our new home… fast forward to January 2017, we closed and The Holtz House was officially born! TA-DA! So that’s how we got to where we are today. I couldn’t be happier with our decision to build our first home. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason in life. If you trust in your path, even when life throws you challenges, you’ll always land where you need to be.
-Lauren