our Thriving Home is coming!

It seems like Matt and I have talked about moving forever. It’s been over a year since we officially made the decision to move but we didn’t know what a move would look like. Should we move away? Should we stay local? Should we buy a house? Should we build a house?

Because of Matt’s job we were able to consider any location as far north as Maine (too cold for me!), as far south as northern Virginia, as far west as Pittsburgh, and as far east as the Jersey shore. We didn’t have a preference on a location, besides the fact that we hoped to be in a good school district. (I’ll define this in a later post!)

We were open to the idea of building a new house and met with a custom builder locally. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a lot in our price range on which to build. We were thankful the builder was honest with us and didn’t try to stretch us over the budget we had to work with.

Then we looked into building a home with a builder who builds communities. We loved homes built by NV Homes, Toll Brothers, Tuskes Homes, and Schell Brothers. Schell Brothers had our favorite floor plan and we strongly considered moving to Delaware to live in one of their communities. I even went as far as taking a tour of their local elementary school – which was absolutely amazing.

In the end, we decided to stay in the local area we are in now. We narrowed down what school districts we wanted to live in. There are 17 school districts in our local area so it gave us a lot to think about. We finally decided on 3 possibilities.

I started to scan the MLS listings on Zillow and Realtor.com every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We found a few houses we liked and one that I loved, but none that were just right for us. Every one seemed to be missing key elements we were looking for in a new house. The one I loved wasn’t in the best neighbourhood and there wasn’t a lot of places we could have outdoor home security cameras so we decided against it.

We kept thinking about what we wanted in our current house and since we weren’t finding it in an existing house, we even looked into manufactured homes for sale but we finally decided to build. Luckily, the custom builder we met with earlier heard about a lot someone wanted to sell. It was in an existing neighborhood that is half finished.

This past summer we closed on the lot and officially own it. I’ll continue to document our process in building our Thriving Home. At the moment I’m still asking questions like “what is dry hire?” and confused as to where we can buy the materials needed but it’s all one big learning process. Our goal is to build a house that is efficient and will fit our needs as best as possible. This is going to be our forever home.

Do you live in your forever home?

xoxo

–k

Read how our Thriving Home process began