Boy, were there a lot of ups and downs. I don’t even know where to start – but I do know this will all be best explained through gifs and memes.

I’ve been talking about buying a house for a long time on this blog. That’s because it took us roughly a YEAR. I never expected to spend a year looking for my first home, and I’m so so lucky that my parents let us live with them while we looked. Finding a house wasn’t the problem – in fact very early on I found what I just knew in my heart was THE house – and I’ll write a whole other blog post about how emotional it was to love and lose. This happened a few times, actually. And it was awful every time.

I’ll try to keep the financial bit short because that’s not really what this blog’s about, but I wanted to put it out there because it’s stuff I wish I’d known. My husband and I have always been very good about budgeting and watching what we do with our money. We went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace class as a wedding present and I still think it was one of the best things we ever did for our relationship. Dave Ramsey teaches that you should NEVER use credit cards, and especially when you’re young I agree with that….to a point. I remember one lesson very clearly where he addressed credit scores. Having not owned a credit card for years, he tried to check his only to find he didn’t have one. But by saving money and paying in cash/debit, he’d never needed one. Dave teaches that the ONLY time you should ever buy something and not pay up front is for a mortgage. What ends up getting tricky though is that you need good credit to get a loan. Back in Dave’s day, credit came from all sorts of places. You could call up a person’s landlord, doctor, utilities, almost anything and just get good word of mouth. Today you MUST have some kind of credit. We both had steady jobs, we’d never missed a rent payment or even paid late, we’d payed off student loans, and we were making regular payments on a new car. That was so not enough. If you don’t own a home, GET A CREDIT CARD. Get a card with a grocery store or for gas and always pay it off on time. I stand by Dave that budgeting and paying in cash/debit is the wisest way to manage money, but put one regular easy to pay off thing on a credit card – and NEVER use it for anything else. I mean it – credit card debt is about a million times worse than having to wait a while to get a house. It’s a necessary evil though, so don’t believe it when you hear you should just stay away. I felt kind of betrayed because I’d been told that by people I love and trust, and it came back to bite me in the ass. I worked really hard to do what I thought was right, and it wasn’t easy AND it never paid off. That sucks. Don’t do what I did.

^I used to do this webseries on financial literacy for college money. That’s my little sister as the Princess. Good times – I’d love to make another one about buying a house and credit and all that, but alas, I’m not a student anymore and I’m too busy to work for free. See, betcha didn’t know that about me – I have this whole secret passion for boring old finances. ANYWAY.

Alright, now on to the fun pictures. Once we finally did close on the house, there was a lot of work to do. We spent a weekend painting and fixing some things up. I’m very proud to say that I got through all of it with no pain medicine!

My sweet realtor has become a dear friend and she told me today that she thinks I should do a whole blog on how I made over the house. I had another friend tell me I should go into flipping houses for a living. I’m all design, I suck at the actual doing – the beautiful red and white wall is all hand-painted by my mother, all I did was imagine it. But it would be fun to talk about each room. I dunno about starting a whole new blog, but if you guys are interested I might do a mini-series on my home makeover. Yes? No?

My IBS has been acting up very badly, but being only sort of moved in we haven’t had real meals in a while – just sort of eat random things at random times randomly. I know this is really bad but I’m honestly too busy to help it right now. Hopefully in the next few days I can go shopping and start eating like a normal person.

That is if I have any spoons left for meal times.

The pain stayed away until the day we started actually moving in. I left work early to meet the carpet cleaners and I was so late. I’m lucky that Greener Cleaners waited for me and couldn’t have been kinder about the whole thing. But the stress triggered a flare of pain that only got worse as we started hauling in furniture and boxes. I envisioned that moving in would be like this:

But it was a lot more like this:

And I thought sleeping in my new house would be like this:

But it was a lot more like this:

And I reeeeeally didn’t expect the hot water heater to suddenly not work right when we moved in.

Overall, moving in to your first home is a lot less like this:

and a lot more like camping.

But of course, things aren’t all bad. They’re just moving fast and full of surprises. I’m looking forward to the whirlwind settling, because there are a LOT of awesome things about my house. I can’t wait to just live in it, you know?

I have a GIANT closet. This is me getting ready in the morning:

And I can’t wait to get our “mood tile” bathroom floor installed.

And the loft is the perfect place to burst into song.

I’m working on turning the downstairs bathroom into a magical Narnia-esque wonderland. I’ve already glittered the ceiling!

And I’ve already spent some time fireside, my favorite place to be. And Mimi has discovered that there are vents in the floor – her new favorite place to be.

So overall, things are good. Except that I accidentally stayed up till midnight writing this. Fingers crossed I hop in the shower just in time for warm water! (plumber comes tomorrow)