Let's rewind a few years back to 2009, my husband and I were living in a nice 2 bedroom condo in Northern Kentucky, we had been married for just over 2 years and we were trying to figure out where life would take us. At the time we thought we loved where we were living, but for some reason every time we went to visit family in Michigan it was getting harder and harder to leave. My husband had been working at a job he loved and we had said a few times that if it wasn't for his job we would think about moving up to Michigan to be closer to family.
Thanksgiving 2009, the news came that my husband's company was going to be doing another round of lay offs and this time he was one of the people that were going to be let go. This news didn't really come as a shock as they had mentioned it before, but it just hadn't happened yet. We found out at the time that his actual last day of work wouldn't be until the end of January 2010 so that gave us plenty of time to think about our options.
We finally decided that it was a sign that the one thing holding us to N.KY was no longer an issue so we packed up both of our cars with our essential items and headed to Michigan. My mom had plenty of room so we setup shop at her house while we both went job hunting. We knew that the economy in Michigan was one of the worst in the nation so we gave ourselves a 4-5 week time limit for finding a job and if we didn't find one in that time we would head back to N.KY.
Well low and behold another sign, my husband found a job within 2 weeks of being in town. He stated pretty much immediately and that was it, we decided to go back to N.KY and list our condo for sale and move all of our stuff up to Michigan. Despite the hard economic times and the housing crash our condo sold within 2 weeks so we felt we were super lucky.
Now came the fun part, house hunting. We started in February and spent hours and hours going over budgets, locations, schools and houses for sale before we actually looked at our first house. The first house we looked at was actually a house that I lived in from ages 2-5 and I had some strange fantasy about living there again and making the same memories with our future children. It was in kind of rough shape as it was a short sale, but we put in an offer and found out 2 months later that it was accepted by the lien holding bank. Next came the inspection, which it had a few major issues come up so we were going to submit a lower offer according to the repairs it needed.
Fast forward to May, 2 weeks before we were supposed to close, our dreams, or rather my dreams were crushed as the sellers could not provide the financial information necessary for a short sale and decided not to sell. By this time our condo was already sold and the new owner had taken possession, we had committed our lives to moving to Michigan and we both started to wonder if we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. Instead of getting upset we just moved on to looking at more houses, we were just about done when our realtor told us about a super cheap fixer upper in a nice area. We looked at it and jumped at the opportunity to buy the house for cheap and then make it exactly how we wanted it to be. We put in our offer, it was accepted and we were ready to go.
Inspection time again and this house failed even worse than the first one, in fact in order to make it livable it would take $70-80k which was unimaginable. Need less to say, we moved on from that one and continued to look at more properties. After looking at more than 40 homes we finally found it, the perfect cape cod in a beautiful neighborhood and the price was right. Bonus, the sellers didn't want to move everything so they included a bunch of items which meant we had to spend even less money on buying things to furnish our new home.
After all the waiting, ups and downs, heartbreak and joy we finally closed on our new house on June 29th, 2010. The sellers had 2 weeks to get their stuff out and hand over the keys, but they said they didn't need that long and surprisingly we were able to meet them at our new house to pick up the keys on July 3rd. I must say we spent the whole day cleaning and had my mom over for a nice cookout for the 4th of July.
And then the real work began....
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