ICYMI We Moved! + New House Before Tour

It has been a whirlwind few weeks! In case you missed it (ICYMI) we moved to a new house! I’ve shared the whole thing on Instagram so if you aren’t following over there you are missing out!

So long story short, a friend of ours mentioned to us his neighbor was moving and just wanted to get rid of the place fast so we could probably get it pretty cheap. We hadn’t been thinking of moving and were just finishing renovations in our basement because we had planned to be there for a few more years. We decided to go have a look – just for fun but had no intention of moving. First Impressions we were pretty underwhelmed, to be honest. Everything was dated and the bedrooms felt small or the same size as we had already and it was only about 10 minutes away from where we currently lived. I felt like it was a lateral move and couldn’t justify uprooting everyone for a little more main living space when we were happy and COMFORTABLE where we were. (Keyword comfortable.)

We tossed the pros and cons for a few days but I still wasn’t convinced and the headache of having to sell our current house added to my desire to just stay put. Then another friend messaged us and asked if the house beside us was for rent because someone had told him it was. It was not for rent just vacant waiting to be demoed, BUT this put a grand idea into my husband’s mind of renting out our house and then moving to the other one so we could own two properties! He’s been very interested in investment properties but with us already owning one if we were to buy another (even a small one) we would have to put 20% downpayment and we didn’t have that much saved up. But if we were to rent out this one and move to the new one we could essentially have our cake and eat it too – by having a rental property AND not having to put 20% down on our new house as it would be our primary residence. (Canadian Mortage rules) As excited as he was, I wasn’t budging. It still felt lateral to me and wasn’t sure we could even cover our costs if we rented out ours… who can afford to rent a whole house that just had its mortgage renewed? Eek!

Well, needless to say, after some market research there were lots of properties listed higher than ours would be and they were wayyyy uglier. But I was still dragging my heels…until I was driving our babysitter home one night and inspiration hit me like lighting. The other house (new house), had a flat roof over the garage and patio doors out to the top but it was from the kid’s room…BUT WHAT IF we could do a big reno and swap the master bedroom to that side and make an epic addition and patio over the garage? Suddenly I could see us living there.

I shared my idea with my husband and HE WAS SOLD! – He is a salesman so he’s pretty easy to convince 😉 But it got us both so excited about the possibilities of this new place and suddenly it didn’t feel like such a lateral move anymore.

This is the point where everything turned a bit blurry for me because it all happened so fast, but basically, we pondered and prayed about this decision and it felt good and like God had brought this opportunity to us so we started moving forward.

As fate would have it my husband had arranged to meet with a lady from his business networking group who happened to be a mortgage broker….2 WEEKS BEFORE any of this had even happened! They were meeting to network but I know God knew we would be needing a mortgage broker before we even did. She was able to get everything started for us and find a lender in a couple of days and we put an offer on the house!

We applied to get some extra renovation funds rolled into our mortgage so we could make the addition plans happen or other renos plans come true. After some drafting and quick quotes from our contractors, the idea of the full addition felt a bit too far out of budget, AND that made us question everything, whether we still wanted this place if we couldn’t do that, and so forth.

To give you some context here is the outside of the house where you can see the upper level with the patio doors and my proposed plans for renovating it.

I won’t bore you with all the details but we are likely not doing the addition just based on funds. It felt too high risk to the lenders so wouldn’t allow for the full amount we were asking for to do the addition. We also thought it felt like it would overvalue the house for the neighborhood, BUT nothing is out of the question yet. We still were able to get some additional renovation funds so we will be renovating either the kitchen, or the basement, or maybe we find a way to make the addition work. We have to get an engineer in here to look at things and give us some solid quotes on what’s possible. The buying process all went so fast and the owners were being difficult about letting us get in and have an engineer look beforehand so we haven’t done that yet.

Regardless of all of that we still felt good about the house and moved forward (obviously). We had 1.5 weeks to pack up our house and move because we found renters for it ASAP – Another blessing and sign to us that this was the right move. It’s been a wild ride so far and we are just getting started! 🙂

We have mostly unpacked, a few more boxes to go through but here are the official before photos of the place. It’s very 90’s everything and needs so much love! I will probably redo the whole exterior too but the inside is the focus right now.

A small detail but a FRONT DOOR is something I’m so excited about! haha. Our last house had one side entrance and it was annoying, so even this door is a major upgrade.

The Living room. I love green but the shades they used are not my style. EVERYTHING needs fresh paint. There are years of grime on all the walls.

They left behind a lot of furniture too so we are just using it for now until we figure out a layout.

The dining room set the previous owners left behind. It’s too big for the space but we’ll use it for now.

The kitchen needs more work than we realized so it might be the first to go. The paint was chipping a bit but peeled even more when I started to clean, and the functionality of the kitchen has caused some paint points already so we’ll see what happens.

Off the kitchen there is a family room with a fireplace and a covered deck off the side of it.

Back to the main hallway there is tons of storage. This is another huge upgrade as our last house had one closet for the whole house.

Up the stairs there is the kid’s bathroom and the 3 bedrooms. The Master bedroom has an ensuite and walk-in closet. The ensuite needs a new toilet and other upgrades so we are all sharing the main bath right now.

The kid’s bedrooms have more bold green colors, and the one has the patio doors onto the garage I mentioned earlier.

Down the back hall is my husband’s office, another closet, a half bath, and the laundry room that is off the attached garage.

The garage is mostly full of tools the previous owners left behind so we will dig through and keep what we want and have a big yard sale in the spring.

The basement is mostly unfinished with a few roughed-in spaces and tons of storage! We will likely wall off half the storage and make it into our home gym.

Out in the yard, there is even more storage and a greenhouse. We are on the corner lot so there is tons of yard space too. I’m excited to see it all come to life and bloom in the spring.