Our First Month of Homeownership

Saturday marked one month of homeownership, and my goodness, what a ride it’s been! We’ve learned many lessons along the way that I’m excited to share with you today. If you never got a chance to read about how we became homeowners in the first place, it’s a pretty good story. Just a few months ago I would have never imagined that I’d be sitting in a house that we owned, writing about owning it for a month! Life can go so differently than imagined, with both good surprises and bad. (This one was definitely a good one!) 😉

So to celebrate being homeowners for a whole month, I thought I’d share with you 3 things we’ve learned from the experience.

1. Most home projects normally take longer and are more complicated than we originally think they will be.

We are chronic underestimate-ers when it comes to the length of projects. I think we really learned this last spring when we made our own coffee table, but it’s been reaffirmed as homeowners. What we think will take an hour ends up taking four hours. When we think we’ll be eating dinner at a decent time it somehow ends up being 8pm. Basically, we’ve just decided in the past few days that we should pretty much always double our estimations of how long something will take, and then be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t take that long. Has anyone else struggled with this?

2. We don’t necessarily work well together, but we do work well next to each other.

Something that we’ve learned (again, that coffee table was pretty eye-opening), is that we don’t necessarily work very well on projects together. We do, however, work well when we’re working on separate things in the same vicinity. This is something that I’d like to work on, but I’m also a realist and know that maybe it’s just not the best for our personalities to be working on the same thing. We just have too strong of opinions on how things should be done and let me tell ya, they are very different opinions 90% of the time!

3. There are going to be surprises and things that go wrong, but that just gives us an opportunity to learn something new.

In the past month we’ve had a few things crop up that we weren’t expecting, but it’s always led to us learning a new skill. For example, a week or so ago our kitchen sink got clogged. Like clogged where there is no easy solution except to take the whole thing apart. Brian has never done any plumbing before, but after multiple trips to Home Depot (getting lots of advice from the pros as well as lots of tools and piping), he was ready to go! Not only did he unclog our sink, but he also re-plumbed all new pipe, since what was down there was old and pretty gunky. Then a few days later he installed a new faucet that we had. The clogged sink actually helped him learn some plumbing so that he had a better idea what he was doing when it came to installing a faucet.

Homeownership has definitely been a lot more work than I thought it would be… but also more rewarding than I ever imagined. It’s so much fun to see those changes that we were never able to do as renters—painting walls, new lighting, tearing out cabinets, hanging our own blinds, and more! We’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way… and I’m sure that we’ll just continue to learn as we continue to grow as homeowners!