A rare photo from last weekend of all four of us looking actually somewhat decent

Today is my birthday, and if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you know that I’m a big fan of birthdays — my own included. I love celebrating milestones (let’s be honest, I love to celebrate just about anything), so birthdays tend to be a big event around here. I actually am not super into huge, amazing gifts generally — KC is a master gift-giver, while I am more in the “it’s the thought that counts” camp. I usually ask for a card and a night out for my birthday (though this year I did add “sleeping in” to my list of wishes), but this year we got a pretty major present for my 34th… 

WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

We started the process of house hunting earlier this year, hoping to purchase something this summer or fall after we moved back to the states. While I was back in California last month I toured some houses and met with our realtor, thinking that I would just get a sense of the market so we could keep an eye on things while overseas. The day before I was scheduled to meet our realtor and tour a few properties, a house popped up on Redfin. It was in our target neighborhood and school district and it was so funky and cute, I knew I had to see it. I toured it the next day and fell head over heels for it (something I was totally not expecting during our home search). It was over our budget (of course), so I all but wrote it off for the time being.

house photos are from the online listing

KC flew in that weekend, so we planned to go to a few open houses that Sunday. I added this house to the list because I had loved it so much, and was a little surprised to find that KC loved the house as well when we toured it. Still, it was over our budget, so we pretty much filed it under “wouldn’t it be nice” and moved on.

We ended up meeting with our realtor two days later to tour a couple more houses, as I had wanted her to meet KC in person. We ended up going back to this house again (I couldn’t get it out of my head!) Our realtor could tell how much we liked it and she said, “Why don’t we just make an offer?” Offers were due that evening and we hemmed and hawed and called our loan agent to see if it was even possible. Somehow we managed to pull our offer together in a matter of hours, submitted it right before the deadline, and then packed up all of our things because we were hopping on a flight back to Amsterdam the very next day (nothing like getting it all in at the last minute!)

The next day we heard that there were multiple offers on the house, so while we were still hopeful, we assumed that it would be the first in a line of “almost!” home offers (it was our first offer, after all!) We ended up being in touch with our realtor throughout the first part of the day, counter-offering and negotiating terms — all the usual house offer stuff (though I suspect doing all of this between bag drop and passport check was a bit out of the ordinary). I was literally docusigning papers as we were stepping onto the plane at SFO (because boarding a 10+ hour flight with two small children isn’t stressful enough, right?) and got a call after we had pulled away from the gate that we were in escrow, just as I was about to turn off my phone

Crazy, right?

We went through the whole escrow process from Amsterdam, which included a trip to the US Consulate as a means of taking care of our loan documents since we wouldn’t be back on US soil for the signing, and woke up this morning as official home owners.

A pretty great birthday present, no?

Special shoutout to everyone who really stepped up to help us through this process while we were overseas — especially my parents, who have done way more than we ever could have asked or expected them to; my uncle Kent, our amazing loan agent; Jason, brother-in-law extraordinaire; and Laney, who carried and hand delivered some very important documents from Amsterdam all the way back to California! We couldn’t have done it without you guys and we are so, so grateful for all of your help and support (and we can’t wait to be back in the same state, soon!)