How I Got Here

All of this started because I arrived at a baby shower too early. Well, let me go back a bit further, and explain....

I am not new to the home building process. I did this once before in 2004 with Caruso Homes. At that time I was freshly married, and starting a new life. Now I'm freshly divorced. But that's a whole 'nother blog for a whole 'nother time. :-) Sadly, I don't recall a lot of the first go round of this home building process - I really wished I'd kept a blog so I could look back and see what transpired.

So here I am, doing it once more again. Now I'm a single mom (loving it!!!) of one very happy and well-adjusted first grader. We are currently renting a townhouse in a very nice community, which is five minutes from my church, and my daughter's private school. I really love this area, and was thinking that when I went to buy again, I would purchase a townhouse. BUT, I feel sooooo cramped in this particular town house. Yes, I'm spoiled. I can acknowledge this. My first single family built was 6,000 sq ft. Way too much for me now, but I'm feeling tight in the 1200 current sq ft. But never fear....they do make large townhouses!!!  So off I went in search of a larger townhouse. Hit a snag. Well, sorta. I'd have to move to a different city/area to get the type of townhouse I desired....2500 sq ft...two car garage. I really was having heartburn about having to move further out, but I didn't feel like I had a choice.

Then I started poking around on Realtor.com, and realized a crazy thing. So many of the single family homes in my current area were the *same price* as these super fancy townhouses in the different city. I'm in the Washington DC Metro area, so I'm not sure if that's a common thing, but I was finding this to be the case. I started thinking, well maybe....just maybe....I could get a resale single family, and stay in my same area. I started saving some homes in my phone app, to take a look a bit later, closer to when I would be ready to make a move.

This is where the baby shower comes in. I was heading to a baby shower for an acquaintance, and the baby shower was being held in and around the area where I'd saved some homes to see. I show up for the baby shower only to find out that they'd decided to change the time to 3 hours later!!!  Apparently, I hadn't read the 'updated' evite. Sigh. No way I was going home and coming back 3 hours later!!! Then the thought hit....let's ride around and take a look at some of these resale homes that I saved on my phone app. And I did.

I passed a Ryan Homes community, and saw the sign for the starting price. This starting price (which we never pay, by the way), was lower than pretty much all the prices on the resales. And yeah, the resales are always negotiable, but who doesn't like new??? I always just assumed 'new' would be out of the ball park for me. But you know how it goes....looking never hurts. So I looked. And I LOVED!!  And more importantly, I wanted.

And so my journey began...