Our First House: A Love Story

I feel like everything with our first house, now known as the Pelham house, was tied together with love. Allow me to explain…

For me, the house was love at first sight. We were set up with a realtor to view a house one evening and he sent over a bunch of listings and asked if we’d like to set up viewings with any other homes. I sorted through the ones that Brad had marked “good” as well as the ones he’d marked “meh.” Pelham was marked “meh,” but I loved it, specifically I loved the peaked roof and the fact that it just looked happy. The realtor got us in. When we saw it, we knew.

We put in an offer when the home had been on the market for only 14 days. The day after we put in an offer, we went to the wedding of two of our friends.

In the days after our offer was accepted and the ball got moving on buying Pelham, we celebrated our first wedding anniversary and cut into the top of our wedding cake.

We had a 90-day close and our sellers rented back from us for another 30 days. So we planned for the house, we thought about what we wanted to do with it. We packed our apartment.

The day we got keys, we attended the wedding of one of Brad’s childhood friends.

We lived in that house for three years, each one full of love. We adopted our two furballs the day before we moved in. Holmes and Watson made our home even more welcoming, loving everyone who sat still long enough for them to. I hosted a bridal shower for my mom at Pelham. I had a house full of ladies preparing food for my best friend’s bridal shower and crashing there after a night on the town for her bachelorette party.

The house saw our second wedding anniversary, our third and by our fourth, it had a new family lined up to love it.

I loved that house, the gray dining room, the closet tucked into the peak, the cove ceilings, the weeping cherry trees out front. I loved putting our mark on it and I loved how the house made me feel.

Pelham was the first house that was ever actually mine. I’m had many places to call “home” but this home was ours through and through. Pelham made me feel like I had roots for the first time in my life.

Yesterday when we signed the papers to close the sale, it took 5 minutes and 10 signatures to make Pelham someone else’s home. Last night, it was bittersweet to walk through the empty rooms to do one final check before leaving the keys on the counter and closing the door one final time.

I can only hope that the new family loves the house as much as we did and as much as the owners before us did.