Wedding Blog

In “celebration” of paying our first mortgage payment yesterday, here are a few pics of the house Mr. Mary Jane and I bought about 6 weeks ago.

If one year ago, you had told Mr. Mary Jane and I that we’d be homeowners today, we’d have laughed in your face. Us? Homeowners? We make a decent-enough living, but we’re not that great with saving money. And we’ve historically been pretty comfortable with paying a rent and letting someone else deal with maintenance and repair concerns. Yet here we are, a little over 2 months from our wedding date, fixing faucets and seeding grass for our 80-year-old home.

What changed? Our priorities, I guess, as well as our comfort zone with renting. We like the idea of building equity, and we also really really wanted to stop sharing walls. It didn’t matter how nice an apartment complex we moved to: we consistently had loud neighbors whose domestic disputes and blatant disregard for their building-mates disrupted our generally quiet lifestyle.

What began with a dream of owning our own “four walls” turned in to a plan. We had to openly and honestly discuss our spending habits and our salaries, as well as how much of a sacrifice we were willing to make in order to save for the house we wanted. We also had to look at our bills and become comfortable with how much we could comfortably pay monthly for a mortgage. If we were to choose a larger or new house, we’d be giving up a lot of comforts we were accustomed to being able to afford. Whereas if we bought a smaller house or fixer-upper, we might be missing out on some of the perks we were expecting in a home.

Mr. MJ and I both have expensive tastes, so it’s hard to reign each other in sometimes. But keeping our future financial stability in mind (and where we’d like to be in terms of monthly bills) helped us stay on track. The house we bought is in the “middle ground”. Our house is a decent size and is in a quiet neighborhood. It’s missing some of the things we’d hoped for (like a deep-soaker tub and walk-in closets), but it’s got the main things we both had on our must-have list: air conditioning, a decent kitchen and a two-car garage. It’s also got some cool extras we never thought about (laundry chute, anyone?!). It needs a little work, but nothing that’s going to break our bank (maybe our backs, but not our banks!).

This is the living room. We need a rug. And a coffee table. But, all in due time.

Here’s the dining room. Mr. MJ’s parents kindly gave us the dining room table, which was being used in their basement as a work-table. The chairs are folding chairs. Someday we’ll have a “real” dining room set, but that stuff is expensive!

I painted this bathroom. It used to be dark, dark red.

Here are the two upstairs bedrooms. There is a bathroom up here, too. The bedrooms are sparse with furniture (the yellow one really has nothing in it aside from the garage-sale sofa, the thrift-store chair, and the gifted end-table). We painted the dark orange bedroom. It was previously navy blue with a tan stripe.

And here is the finished part of the basement, where we watch movies. The furniture down there is all from thrift stores and cost under $150, total.

Not shown is the unfinished part of the basement, which contains the World’s Oldest Still-Working Dryer. It squeaks like crazy but it was free (with mortgage ;)).

We’ve had a lot of fun getting settled in it, and we spend nearly every weekend working on the yard and visiting home improvement stores like Lowe’s for odds and ends. We’ve also tried to cut costs by either going without some items we want (like rugs), or purchasing/accepting used items until we can afford to buy stuff that’s more our style. (Notice that a great deal of our furniture is thrifted or handed down?)

What kind of home do you and your mister have (or plan to have in the future)? Have you had to make sacrifices or compromises to reach your goals together?