We bought our first house! I cannot fully explain what a relief it is to write that. For us, the path to home ownership was pretty much filled with personal and financial land mines to leap over and it all kind of came to fruition in the middle of a pandemic, somehow.

We first started discussing buying a home back in 2017 while living in the cutest pink shotgun house in New Orleans (pictured below). We’d done the math for how much rent we’d paid over the years and were basically like, “holy crap, we are treating this rent money like garbage, let’s stop.” The problem? Well first off we’d just become self-employed which is basically asking a mortgage lender to laugh you out of their office, and second, we weren’t actually sure where we wanted to live—in our same neighborhood? Somewhere nearby? Were our hearts even set on staying in New Orleans? The second thing was even harder to grapple with than the first.

(This photo below is the old house we rented from 2015 to 2017! She was very charming)

Our pink shotgun home in 2017, captured by Dabito of Old Brand New.

So as any pair of responsible adults would, we started a reckless soul searching journey—that whole thing where we renovated our camper Rosie, sold or gave away pretty much everything we owned, and went on a three month long road trip across the country, secretly scoping out new cities and towns where we may want to settle down. We fantasized about life in Southern California, or Boulder, or maybe even somewhere sleepy and unexpected like New Mexico. We thought about logistics and cost of living and the future and where we’d want to raise kids. We discussed what we wanted our work to look like and what we wanted our community to look like. And then it was time to head back to New Orleans and we were just as unsure as when we’d left. We didn’t feel like like we’d found the exact right fit, but we didn’t feel like we were heading home, either.

Talk about a heavy road trip, huh?

Somewhere along the way in our road trip with our camper, Rosie.

We got back to New Orleans and spent a month or so living at my mom’s house while we settled with our thoughts and balanced practicality with our blurry desires. To be honest it wasn’t the best time for us. The future had never really been more foggy, and we were questioning pretty much every single thing in our lives, but I’m glad we were united over this bleary confusion rather than divided.

So, we were with my amazing loving and supportive mom, who lives in the town of Covington, Louisiana, which is about an hour’s drive from New Orleans. During our time staying with her we actually kind of fell in love with the small town charm, and the quiet… except for the weirdly heavy rush hour traffic. With all the noise in our heads about where to go and what to do next with our lives, some quiet just sounded nice. So, no longer hell bent on buying a home in a city we weren’t even sure we wanted to live in, we ended up signing a lease on a small suburban apartment in this new town. In retrospect, this was the best decision we’ve probably ever made.

Though this new apartment would never have the charm of any home we’d ever lived in, we managed to add pops of color here and there and bring it from sterile new-build to cozy little mid-mod hangout.

It was a pause to get our bearings and figure out what was next. We focused on work, we set goals—physical, personal, financial, you name it—and met them, we saved a whole lot more money than we ever could’ve expected (living in a small town with very few nearby friends and limited entertainment options will do that automatically). Even though it was random and probably looked weird to a lot of our friends an hour away in New Orleans, the move served its purpose and then some. About eight months into living in our new place we started getting sentimental about where we were, geographically. We visited local strawberry farms and took trips kayaking in the bayous and biked through trails in the woods to visit local breweries.

Despite the heat and humidity, the overwhelming sense of place of South Louisiana started to win us back over. We’d just needed to look at it with a different perspective. And so somewhere in the beginning of 2019 we agreed that while our eyes had wandered West for a bit, our hearts were definitely stuck in the swamp. Just 18 months prior when we’d first started thinking about homeownership—before the road trip and the stay with mom—we definitely weren’t ready to commit. We weren’t in a unified emotional and mental headspace about what and where home was supposed to be.

Our official official home search started in February of 2020. After almost a year of being positive we wanted to buy in New Orleans, we were eyeing our end-of-lease date in July and were ready to start the process. We’d pinpointed an extremely specific part of New Orleans we wanted to live in and were laser focused on any homes that popped up in that area, and we toured several of them. Trying to find a place to call home while covered in masks and gloves and sanitizer wasn’t quite what we’d imagined when we started this process pre-pandemic, but it didn’t deter our excitement.

One day, about a month into the search, a house randomly showed up in a different neighborhood that we hadn’t even considered and changed everything. Within 24 hours of the listing getting published, we rushed to see it and fell in love. It was a lot of things we hadn’t originally been looking for. It was old (like super old) and huge (like super huge), at least by first home standards. We’d be taking on way more remodeling projects than we were anticipating, but instead of those things being turn offs, they felt more like happy little opportunities.

We made an offer that night.

Sweaty and excited from a day of house hunting. The house pictured is not the home we made an offer on.

Less than a day later we’d gotten the seller’s response to our offer, did a little dance, and went under contract. Inspections went pretty well considering the house was born before my great-grandmother, and we found out we could get an incredible interest rate 2% lower than we originally expected. We said yes to everything. Last Thursday, June 25th, we signed a million different documents and then the house was ours.

It took like three years of confusing decision-making, emotional work, financial planning, and patience, and it all paid off and now we’re homeowners. We officially move in on July 7th, and honestly? I’ve never been more excited. As we move through this process and get settled in the house, there will be many more photos of the actual home to share, and we’ll of course be covering all types of renovation projects, designs, and DIYs for you here :)

Thank you for reading this little tid-bit about our journey on this. If there are other parts of the story you’re interested in, let us know in the comments!

xoxo

Beau

From 2017 to 2020, The Journey of Buying Our First Home