All I can say is to anyone out there who is sick of saving and waiting and saving and waiting, it is so worth it! Right now we have a lot of freedom and no stress from the house. If we hadn't saved it could have been very stressful. Also, we bought a lot less nice of a house than the bank said we could so that we could have this freedom.
We bought a fixer upper foreclosure. We'll probably stay 2-3 years, maybe a bit longer. The house is perfect for us as an "in between" house. It is meant to have an upstairs, but it was never finished. The house had been empty 3-5 years, depending on which neighbor you talk to which means that when we bought it there were a lot of things that we just didn't know about the house. I love it though:).
In the last two months we, and by we I really mean mainly my husband, have moved all of our stuff out of our old place (including both of us), moved into a family cottage for a month while we worked at this house, and moved into this house. During that month he replaced the flooring in a third of the house (vinyl planking anyone?), most of the walls and ceilings were painted, everything was cleaned (huge project), vines removed, bushes removed, electric wiring replaced (some of it had been stolen while the house was empty), toilet and vanity replaced, lighting fixtures added, septic tank emptied (after quite an episode), plumbing lines fixed (they were broken everywhere because of improper dewinterization), what plumbing lines were originally there were cleaned (after that same episode-a story for another day), kitchen cabinets modified, appliances installed, and much much more. I can't say enough thanks to both of our parents who really helped us out a bunch and of course none of this could have been done without my husband.
I am glad we left off a large emergency fund because many of those items could have been really stressful because they were unplanned (although we in a way planned for the unplanned because with it being a foreclosed house we knew it would have issues). Yet, those house problems just ended up being annoyances.
The house was a large disruption to my goal setting, but I decided that it was better that I help my husband and keep up with my job and that I could come back to my goals.
Here are my goals for October:
1. Keep Eph 2:10, Isaiah 41:10; Psalm 90:12, Proverbs 12:18, Hebrews 4:15-16, and Matthew 11:28 Colossians 3:23, and Ephesians 4:1-3. Memorize 1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
2. Work out 30 min a week. School is pretty intense this year because we went 1-to-1 and we have a new evaluation system. Also, the house takes up a lot of time, so I'm pushing it down to 30 min and then will work it back up to 60 min again.
3. Visit each set of grandparents once. We'll see on this one. It might be kind of tricky.
4. Get caught up with the read through the Bible in a year. I am nine days behind right now. It was hard to stay on top of it at the cottage because I get emailed the readings each day and we didn't have internet.
For the moment I'm not making any money goals. We have been keeping track of all expenses with the house in a spreadsheet and we had a budget made up. Luckily, so far we are under budget. Later we are going to go over everything that is left and make more specific goals.
Also, there are a lot of goals with projects, but those are for another day.
So, if you are sick of saving and waiting, I just want to encourage you to wait until the time is right. There were lots of different times that we looked at houses and decided against buying. We knew that it would put too much stress on us and our marriage. I just found out today that another couple that is my age is getting a divorce. I have no idea what their difficulties were, but I do know that financial issues can cause a huge strain and I am glad that we decided to live frugally so that we could reduce that stress.
Good luck with your future projects. I'm hoping that at some point (it could be months) I can give you some before and after pictures. They'll be worth the wait!
