Can you tell that I'm just a
little excited? This big, first-time purchase was a long time coming. It's been a whirlwind year with moving to a different state, job promotions for Sebastian and now a house purchase. If you would have asked me in grade school what I would be doing in my late-twenties, I probably would have said two kids, a house in the country and living in Minnesota. My life is nowhere near that childhood prediction and I'm okay with that. I'm learning as I get older that having a plan is important to stay on track, but that you need to realize and be okay when that plan deviates from the original blueprint. I'm just as happy as I anticipated I would be in grade school, it's just in a completely different setting. Life is interesting in that way.
It's no secret that the housing market in California is pricey, and in San Jose it's even more expensive, which is why Sebastian and I have waited such a long time to buy a house. We thought about buying in California a couple of years ago when the market crashed, and I'm glad we waited because it made the transition of leaving California a bit easier.
Our house search went much quicker than I thought it would and I have Sebastian to thank for that. We began looking at the end of December put in an offer a little over a month later, which surprised and frightened me since I am incredibly indecisive. I'm that girl standing in the aisle at Target for ten minutes trying to figure out which type of toilet paper I should buy even though they're practically all the same. Imagine what I was like when I had to decide on the biggest purchase of our life so far. I literally fell in and out of sleep and had sporadic dreams of house hunting the night before we decided to put in an offer. No lie. I could have drove myself crazy, but thankfully Sebastian stopped me and said we just needed to take the leap.
And so, this is what one assertive, cute, husband will get you...welcome to our humble abode.
Our new home is located in Scottsdale. Originally my heart was set on buying a home in Tempe since that's where we are now and because I have weird loyalty issues to any area I've lived in more than five months apparently. I was also set on not having to move Aliyah to a new daycare, but our new place is about 25 minutes away so it's inevitable that she has to go somewhere new. (This disappoints me since she is so in love with her teachers and even has a "best friend" there already. She pretends to call him all the time from my phone.)
In terms of the type of house we were looking for, we were all over the board. One of the first houses we saw was absolutely gorgeous and came in at a whopping 4,000 square feet and was at a great price. We didn't know much about the area it was in, which was something that bothered me. It seemed nice, but in the end we decided, after seeing that we would need two air conditioners to keep the place cool in the summer, that the house was a bit too big for what we needed at this time in our lives. (My mom's response: How would you keep that clean? Good point, Mom.) After that we went on to try to find something we liked in the historic districts of Phoenix. Those houses come with a heftier price and not as many square feet. We came close to considering one, and it was hard to walk away from all that old Phoenix charm, but the rooms were small and the top floor layout wasn't very practical for our family to grow into in the coming years. After all was said and done, we looked at many different home styles--historic houses, brand new houses and fixer uppers.
In the end we narrowed it down to three houses. One in Tempe, one in North Scottsdale and the one we bought. Our deciding factors to put in a bid were the proximity to Sebastian's office and Old Town Scottsdale, a great school district, the cul-de-sac location of the house and the fact that we had heard that the area was a great part of Scottsdale overall.
It's a great four-bedroom house and is definitely a house we could walk into and live in right now. But since we've waited this long to buy, we have plans to make a few big updates. The most exciting one being a kitchen overhaul and adding in hardwood flooring to the entryway, dining room and hallway. As you can tell, I'm not crazy about the tile in the house, but we're keeping it in the kitchen and the common room that leads out to the backyard since we're not sure if it's a good idea to put hardwood floors in an area that gets a lot of wet traffic from the pool. Maybe one day we'll replace the tile in those areas. Or who knows, maybe I'll live with it for a bit and love it.
The kitchen will be getting white cabinets. I'd like to put in dark stained butcher block, and it will get all new appliances, since the ones there are either missing or old. I have yet to decide on a paint color, but I know I want to add a light, cooler, pastel in here. The kitchen also has this great bay window that I absolutely adore. We're keeping it as is right now, but that's another area down the road that I'd love to accentuate.
This island below is looking out to the common room from the kitchen. My first inclination was to rip this baby out since it seemed somewhat out of place, but now we've decided to keep it since it should make a good breakfast bar, as well as give us additional storage. I guess technically we are taking this out, but we'll keep the same layout, just with new cabinets. I'm toying with the idea of making this island a different color than the kitchen cabinets, but I'm not sure if I'm that much of a risk taker. I've seen in done on home decor blogs and on Pinterest. And we all know that if you see it on Pinterest it can be easily done, right? Oh if only that were true.
The view below on the left is looking into the kitchen from the dining room. The view on the right is if you moved yourself over from the dining room into the entry way and looked into the common room. We also see the hubs hard at work on demo plans and his cute little helper.
These two photos below show if you were to look into the dining room. And then the photo on the left shows if you were to look out of the dining room into the living room. I'd like to paint the maroon colored wall something different. I am in love with the pillars and the ceiling skylights. It's one of the things that we initially loved about the house when we stepped into it for the first time. Our inspector told us that the skylights were actually part of an indoor atrium when the house was originally built. I guess that was the thing to do in the southwest in the 80's.
The light fixture in the dining room must leave. I'm excited to find a cool, unique fixture to place there instead. There's also this area that's out of the shot that I think might make a perfect sitting area with some bookshelves. The dining room will be one of the areas getting hardwood floors as well.
We love the fact that we have a fireplace, but the position of the fireplace is kind of odd and definitely off-centered. Eventually we'd like to take revamp this fireplace and take out the bricks to the left of it, but I think we may wait on this for awhile.
Here's the other side of the living room and a view of the entrance. Having an entryway was a must-have for me. Living in apartments for all of my adult life where entryways do not exist have ignited this desire. I honestly cannot wait to decorate this area. One of the things I really like about the entryway in this house are the vaulted ceilings. You can't tell here but it really opens it up. The high ceilings carry over to the common room adjacent to the kitchen. Oh, and when I win the lottery, I'm going to put wood beams on those ceilings. A girl can dream, right?
To the right of the front door is the main hallway where the four bedrooms are located. I have photos of these but they're pretty standard rooms, so nothing too exciting. And here's the entrance from the garage and our laundry room sans the washer and dryer. We just bought our new washer and dryer tonight and let me tell you, I have never been so excited to do laundry in my life. (I'm fully aware that this will pass after I do laundry for a week in the new house.)
Here's a view from the first bathroom. if I had to choose, the size of this bathroom is probably my least favorite thing about the house. It is
tiny. There must be someway we can make it feel bigger or open it up a bit. For now, it's not even on our list at all.
It does have some redeeming qualities though, like these unique patterned tiles. I think these are so cool.
Lastly, we have the master bedroom and bath. Let me tell you, this room is huge. To the point that I have no idea how to decorate this space. There's a lot of potential here, but it's probably a little bigger than we really need. Too bad we couldn't magically transfer some of that space to the tiny bathroom.
The master bedroom also has a good-sized bathroom that looks like it was recently re-done. This view only shows the double sinks and the tub, but if you were to turn around there's a toilet and a nice shower.
And that's the initial tour. Sebastian and I are excited to put our own mark on this house and see it evolve in the coming months and years. For now, I'm just excited to be able to move into our first home in a few months!
