You’ll probably hear us say this a lot when referring to our current Delaware home. It’s our forever home. After relocating for our jobs 3 times, it was time to settle down in one spot and start our family.
Back when we had our first house in Maryland, I had always had a vision that when we finally settled down long term we would be building our dream home. Like, the type that you ride around town/the country side, find a beautiful piece of land, locate an architect and builder, come up with blue prints, and have this house personalized and built to every single desire and preference. Something like this:
Image courtesy of houseplans.com
Sounds amazing right? Also sounds friggin expensive. My naive first time home buyer self didn’t understand the dollar signs that went along with my ideas.
When we moved to South Carolina, we were very flexible on the type of house we were going to buy, as long as it had a good kitchen footprint and 3 bedrooms. We were going to renovate it and sell it for profit. (We didn’t even have a garage on our wishlist… crazy, right?) We saw SO MANY homes. Probably too many. But we eventually narrowed it down to a few, and put in an offer on the one that topped our list and got it. If there was anything we learned from that experience, it was that homes come in so many shapes and sizes, and you may have to look at a ton of them, but you can usually find something close to what you’re looking for. So, when it came to our move back home to Delaware, we discussed dream home vs. forever home.
Dream home: something built just for us. Forever home: Something we can make ours, just how we want it. Renovating our South Carolina house taught us to have confidence in our renovating and DIY experience. And also allowed us to really personalize things to our liking without having to hire someone to do it. And that was my fundamental issue with building a home. To get someone to personally build a house the way we wanted would cost a fortune. And to go to a builder who is creating a new development would limit our options on overpriced layouts, finishes, and features that we could do ourselves much cheaper (and most likely much better too).
So we searched for a good, established neighborhood with a good school district. Streets with trees. Something close to work and the town. And a house that had good bones and something that we could work to hit all of our check boxes If it didn’t, then we could “easily” change it so that it did. The list below was the exact list that I emailed to our realtor. The underlined items are what we got.
Must Haves (at least):
– 4 bedrooms
– 2.5 baths
– 2000 sq ft
– 2 car garage
– 0.5 acres
– Basement
– Master Suite w/ Large Walk in Closet & Large Bathroom (Dual vanity or enough space to add dual vanity)
– Large Kitchen or the ability to make it into a large kitchen
– Open floor plan or the ability to make it an open floor plan
– Workshop space (can be in basement or even detached building)
Would Like:
– 3 car garage
– 1-2 acres
– Separate Laundry Room w/ room for utility sink
– Garage to not face the street
– Gas stove
– Screened in porch or sunroom
Definitely Not:
– Split Level
– Bi Level
– On a busy street
It’s not perfect, but we’ll make it perfect. So here we are. In our forever home. With our forever family. <3
Have you built your dream home? Or have you bought yours and plan to make it yours forever?