Our road to buying a house, part 1

After Kevin and I were married we went on a long honeymoon across Europe, which was fantastic (and will warrant some posts down the road). Our plan was to get back from our honeymoon and start a year long lease at a gorgeous beach house in East Haven.

The couple we were renting from were awesome. Both lawyers (which we thought the both of us might be at the time), beautiful family, and similar to us... the husband loved the red sox and the wife loved the yankees. We just loved that about them.

However, while on our long honeymoon, this couple was not doing so well. Cheating happened and they were taking steps toward a divorce! He e-mailed me a couple days before the move-in date that he needed to live in the house they were going to rent out and begged us to do "the Christian thing" and void the lease.

Yikes!

We prayed and thought about it and said to ourselves, well there are other fish in the sea, we will find another home to rent.

My parents and my sister Hope were great because they knew that we were going to be at their house for a couple weeks after the honeymoon, so they painted the room and bought us a gorgeous bedroom set to suprise us when we came home. It was darling!

Little did we know, we'd have to stay there for a couple more months than planned and my family was more than accomodating.

The economy was in a downturn and the real estate market went south. Rentals were few and far in between. Every place we looked at was snatched up within hours of putting down a deposit. We were in a serious crunch.

At that time, our friend Amy said that we could house sit for her family since they were going away for a couple months. This was such a blessing!

During the time we were house sitting we got in touch with John Compton, a real-estate maven. He gave us access to a software to look at houses on the market. I researched the market backwards and forwards and realized for myself that we could potentially buy a place.

Why not?

Our family is in CT, our jobs are in CT, we have amazing friends in CT.

Plus, if we ever wanted to move, we could just rent it out.

So, the search began!