Chez Nous

It's so funny the way life turns out.  I always imagined that buying my first house would be this monumental search encompassing the better part of a year.  We would spend months researching the housing market of whatever city we ended up settling down in, interviewing real estate agents and visiting countless open houses.  We would spend our weekends checking out school districts in different neighborhoods and developing lists of "needs" versus "wants" (I would say I couldn't live without a bathtub and the Mr. would not look at anything without a big fenced in backyard).  In hindsight, maybe I've just watched way too much HGTV, but the truth is, our experience in purchasing our first home couldn't have been further from the House Hunters International scenario I imagined. 

It all started when the Mr. got a call from his friend MT telling him that he had an extra ticket to the Big Game (aka: National Championship of 2012).  Our original plan was to fly back to Paris from ATL on January 8th.  But faced with this "once in the lifetime opportunity," the Mr. decided he could not pass up this chance (because LSU never goes to the national championship....) .  So we changed our flights and decided to head down the Nola for the Big Game on January 9th.

At this point, we were certainly not ready to make a commitment to move back to New Orleans, much less buy a home.  The Mr. had just finished school in December and our plan was to look for jobs in Paris and London to extend this fairy tale just a little bit longer.  So when Grande Mme. told us there was a great, recently reduced house for sale down the street, I went against my better judgment and decided to give it a quick look.  After about 5 minutes, I was already envisioning crawfish boils on the deck and morning jogs in the park across the street.  And that was it.  We never interviewed any real estate agents (which probably isn't even a real practice). We never did any real market research (other than ask M. Grande his opinion about the area).  And we never even read about any open houses.  To be fair, we did look at a few other houses while we were in town that week but really just to say we did than anything else.  A month after we made an offer we closed.  And here I am 45 days later blogging about my first home.  No, there is no bathtub and although there is a fence, there is no yard.  But somehow it is absolutely perfect.

Of course, we will never be ready to leave Paris, but having a new house to look forward to is certainly making the transition a lot easier (you can't even imagine the hours I've been logging on Pinterest). I'm sure there will be things we discover about that house that aren't perfect, because nothing ever is.  But nevertheless, I owe a big thanks to MT (and the Honey Badger, if you think about it) because without the ticket to the Big Game, we wouldn't be homeowners.