Our first home

I wrote a whole long blog on how terrible last night was sleep wise and how I was going to try and train Harlan to sleep in his own bed and blah-blah-blah. Luckily I had to do stuff midway through and by the time I came back to it (right now, 6 hours later) I decided I am done with complaining about not sleeping and really want to write about something that has been a huge part of our lives for the past few years, the first home we bought and also the first (and last!) home we had to give back to the bank a few months ago.

E and I met in the Bay Area. I grew up in Alameda myself, right across the bay from SF and right next to Oakland, he grew up in Florida but came to live in California. We had a lot of fun dating because of all the great shows and bars and things to do in the Bay but when we had Dustin and got married we decided we wanted to buy a home. That was in 2006 which was about the top of the market for California and all the homes we looked at in the Bay were in the 500 or 600, 000 range. We only qualified for 320,000 so we were priced out of the Bay. We joined a legion of people who bought homes in the Central Valley.

We managed to purchase our first home only 7 months after Dustin was born and only a year after we got married. I still will never know how E finagled it because he is self employed and we had to go for a no down, no document loan. Many, many phone calls back and forth between the lenders and him and we had our house in a tiny Central Valley town about an hour and a half from Oakland.

For the first year we rented it to a crazy old lady but we couldn't rent it to her for our mortgage because of the going rates in the area. The money spiral downward began. We packed up our stuff, moved to a 1 bedroom (in order to afford the gap between her rent and our mortgage) and made plans to move out to our home in a year. Then I got pregnant again. Thankfully that was right before we were planning on making the move to our home and the timing couldn't have been more perfect. I went on maternity leave hoping to come back via telecommuting. We brought my mom along to help with the mortgage (huge mistake I won't even go into) and we moved.

It was ok, for the first 5 months we enjoyed the little town. Then I lost my job and my husband couldn't get work. The housing market tanked. Somehow really crazy people kept getting dumped in the town. We now had 2 kids, no job and faced a $2000 a month mortgage on a home that was now appraised at $155,000 when we had paid $320,000 for it. We needed a fence, we were on a busy street and if anyone ever forgot to lock the door the kids could have been killed.

This is the whole point of the blog, trusting your intuition. E and I looked at our situation and said we had to get out of there. We had to leave and we had to do it now. There was no work, we wouldn't have been able to re-sell for years, probably about 10 to get what we paid for it. We had to go before the little bit of money we had ran out and we wouldn't have been able to afford to move at all.

We sold everything we didn't need. Our minivan went, tons of his audio and visual equipment, kids stuff, you name it. We took a trip up to the area we live in now, found a home we fell in love with, qualified to rent it and bolted. We had to leave stuff that wouldn't fit in the UHaul and that was really hard for me. Leaving at all was hard but we knew we had a tiny window because we were running through our money.

Today I was tired and slightly morose because of the terrible weather and I looked up our old home on a whim because we knew it had gone into foreclosure. I found it listed for $99,900. That works out to less than $700 a month in mortgage. They had pictures of the way it looked, the dead lawn, the dead roses and orange trees we had so lovingly planted when Harlan was born.

The crazy thing was losing this house had been something I knew we had to do but I hadn't come to peace with. When I saw that listing and how much the house was for sale, something clicked. I said to myself "Well, that is more in line with what that home is worth but you know what? I wouldn't even want to live there for that little." Even for $700 a month in mortgage, that wasn't the house for us and I am at peace with that.

I hope more than anything some great family buys it and it is meant for them since it wasn't meant for us. With all we have gone through in the last few years I am thankful for where we have ended up even though sometimes we didn't know how on earth we were going to make it. We did and we will.

I look forward to dreaming about our next home, the home that will undoubtedly be the home we will have forever. I don't know when that will come, in fact I don't know what tomorrow will bring at all for any aspect of our life but I am ok with that. I am happy right here right now, even without the sleeping.