I know – it shocked me too. We absolutely love our little blue house and it’s bitter sweet to leave the home we love.

Before I tell you where and why we are moving let me tell you why we picked our fixer-upper.

We found our little blue house two and a half years ago after being married about four months. We wanted to find something to really make our own, something that needed work and honestly everything in our price point needed work. The kitchen was purple, the bathroom green, and the upstairs red and pink with a blue shag carpet stained in several places.

But its personality was us. It was the “UP house” in our mind a house we could make our own and one we could quite literally completely change!

I remember several of our family members thinking we were crazy for picking this tiny nearly hundred year old home. But we loved it. We immediately got to work ripping carpet, painting, and making plans for each room.

And for the next two years as we wrapped up one project we moved on to the next. We went room by room and made it not only livable but a place that we love.

We saved up for our biggest project – the kitchen and kicked it off mid summer 2019. As we completed it this fall we were so thrilled imagining that then we would want to just relax and love our home for years to come… but two weeks after we finished touching up paint Zac (who really was the one that thought we would live here for a LONG time) said, “So what’s our next project?”

I didn’t have one to plan out with him.

And that night we realized that as bitter sweet as it was that we had finally gotten the little blue house to where it needed to be and because of that it was time for us to leave it.

So we started looking – when we found the blue home our list was VERY short it was be in Salt Lake, have rental potential, and be in budget. But this time our list was much more challenging:

1. Stay in budget (obviously)
2. Located in-between our offices
3. Attached two car garage
4. Laundry room (oh how I have wanted this)
5. Masterbathroom
6. Two offices (aka spare bedrooms)
7. Rental income potential – since there’s only two of us it doesn’t make sense to have a large home unless we can find a way for that to work to our benefit.

So we started our hunt – months ago. Every morning the first thing I did was get online and check the new listings, shifted through them for which had potential to add a unit downstairs.

We walked through five homes, each time feeling as if they had been remodeled it was slapped together or forced out of our price range because of the remodel… if it still needed one the price was so high there wasn’t much room to turn it and sell later on for more (esp if the market turns).

And yet each home we toured was under contract with someone else in a few days time.

We would be in tiny dark basements trying to figure out how and where to add a walk-out, measuring for kitchens, stretching the budget to find something that had the size we needed.

As someone who normally finds a home in the first three appointments I felt defeated.

That’s when I finally listened to my dad. He had told us “why not look into a new build?” more than a few times! and I had always said thought no – I want to remodel, I love old homes – their personalities, their unique features, their mature trees etc.

And yet stubborn me thought “Fine, we will go look at some new builds so I can tell you how wrong you are.” and that’s when I was so wrong. The third new build I found online had EVERYTHING we needed, and more. And it was less than a lot of the old homes that we had 20-70K of work to still do.

The next day we went and looked at the model home and we knew – this worked for us. The builders agent told us someone had just fallen out of contract on a home that matched the floor-plan we liked and to his/our surprise we said we would take it.

Which means WE DIDN’T PICK ANY OF THE FINISHES. We bought a new build without making any custom selections. No choice on exterior color, countertops, floors, layout etc. What does that mean? I am sure I will be changing a few things 🙂 (sorry Zac haha).

Overall I love our new house and I can see how great it will be for us and our future family. But as we have started telling our family and friends they’ve asked how it feels to go to a “cookie cutter home” and sitting here now I realize that there are pros and cons to every house. In some, the neighborhood is too matchy, in others the closets are too small to fit more than ten items.

At the end of the day buying a home is determining what you can or can’t sacrifice. Writing this now I am realizing our list never had “old home” on it – I had made myself believe that was the only way we could find what we were looking for.

We, like everyone, were searching for a home that met our needs – we just happened to find it in a place I never thought to look.