CLOSED ON OUR FIRST HOUSE!

We have been enjoying the apartment living together for almost 12 years. You know, where we don't have to do yard work or plow snow, or own any yard care equipment, where if something breaks we call the leasing office and they send out a repairman at no extra cost to us, and where we don't have to purchase or maintain any appliances or pay for water use or trash pickup, or even property taxes and closing costs. I estimate we have saved around $15,000 just from not having to own our own washer and dryer (cost, maintenance, water, having to rent a more expensive apartment in order to have hookups, etc). And the list goes on... and sure, we don't have and "equity" by renting, but that is a number completely dependent on the housing market when you choose to sell your home anyway. And sure, there are definitely cons to living in apartments (having to share space with other people, having to smell their cooking when pregnant, etc), but we have also been lucky to live in apartment complexes that have been full of relatively nice and safe people, so the pros have outweighed the cons. So yeah. We have enjoyed the simplicity of apartment living.

But of course there is always the lucrative desire to eventually have a house to call a more permanent home, have our own land where the kids can run around on, where we can grow plants or remodel what we want, where we can do laundry at midnight and leave it until morning, and we can park our car right next to the door to carry in groceries.

When we lived in Salt Lake City, we actually got pretty close to buying a house in Woods Cross. We even made an offer. But then strangely we never heard back from the seller. Not even a denial. Oh, well. Kellen ended up getting a job that took us to Michigan anyway. In Michigan, since it was so far away from all of our family (closest sister was in the Chicago area), we never saw it as a permanent move, so we were never interested in buying a house (even though we still ended up living there for about 8 years). Now that we moved again, and we live closer to some family (closest sister is only 1.5 hours away), and we now that have 4 kids, we decided to finally buckle down and get a house!

We have been passively house hunting since moving to Georgia, but we wanted to get to know the area around us before we bought a house, so we moved into an apartment first and started seriously house hunting after we'd been here about a year, back in June. Once we started narrowing down our options of what we liked amongst what was available, things happened pretty fast. We ended up finding the perfect house for us using Zillow and a realtor - Fayette County, PTC schools, 2300 sqft with a full basement and garage, well taken care of, sits on 3.2 acres, and it came with the lot next to us which is 3.3 acres of just trees. We signed into a contract to buy the house back on June 22nd (there was a little bit of negotiating back and forth for a few days first). However, we didn't want to have to pay the penalty of getting out of our rental lease early, so we talked them into not closing on the house until August 30th. And so here we are! 3 states, 4 kids, and 12 years later, and we finally found a house that we both agreed on!
(Backyard, backyard from back door, side yard, front yard from front door)