They say there’s no place like home for the holidays. This year that’s an especially meaningful sentiment, as my husband and I are about to become homeowners for the first time.
We got a late start on our life together, after first meeting 16 years ago in college. We dated, then reluctantly parted ways, not expecting to meet 14 years later — and reconnecting as if it had only been 14 hours. We’ve had a lot to catch up on since.
When we set out on this new course together, the dream of owning our home didn’t seem attainable. Both of us are journalists, and let’s just say that we didn’t get into the field to get rich. We’d resigned ourselves to a sentence of life in rental prison — that is, until someone told us that with the current low interest rates, a mortgage payment might be less than what we’d been paying in rent.
With our homebuying budget, we didn’t expect to find our dream home this time around. Especially when we saw what’s available in our price range in the Puget Sound real estate market. Talk about sticker shock. You’d think from local home prices that everyone here is living on a trust fund left to them by a wealthy aunt. Yet we live in a region that has some of the worst unemployment rates in the country. The sad reality is that many people are struggling to make their mortgage payments — many of the homes we’ve seen have been “repos,” seized by lenders for non-payment. It makes us feel very fortunate for our modest means. Many people have much less these days.
What’s important to us right now is not a two-car garage, or hardwood floors, or the “right” lighting fixtures. It’s the idea of having a place to call our own, together — along with a big orange cat, two turtles and the newest addition to our family, a rescued bulldog pup. That’s really our “dream home”: a place that we can finally call home.
And that is more than enough.
Andrea Miller is features editor for The Enterprise.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
