We bought a house in Vermont!
It feels a bit surreal to share this news, honestly up until now it hasn’t really hit me that we actually bought a house in Vermont. We’ve been talking about doing this for the last two years. And for the most part it felt like a pipe dream. I guess all of you know me really well or I’m super predictable or both, because nearly every single one of you guessed we bought a Vermont house (there were a few marriage and baby guesses sprinkled in, haha).
It’s not lost on me that I’m sharing this news at a time when people are struggling and the world is in a constant state of chaos. I think about how fortunate we are every single day and I truly do not take that for granted. I debated sharing this news at all, but that didn’t feel right. We will be likely moving in for fall and winter. And I wanted to be honest and also share the process with you. This is an exciting albeit slightly scary step for us. When we bought our first house, which three years later we are still working on (I guess with homes it never ends) we didn’t have a baby in tow as we ripped out bathrooms and renovated a kitchen. It should be interesting.
To rewind a bit, when I found out I was pregnant the search for a Vermont house basically came to a screeching halt.
I was super sick, our life has just completely changed and it just was not a priority at all. I put it in my goals at the beginning of this year but I don’t think I believed it would happen. It was more wishful thinking. Fast forward to this winter and about a month into lockdown during Covid. We couldn’t get Vermont out of our minds and the more we talked it through the more it made sense for us. As much as we’ve loved traveling these last few years, we are ready to stay closer to home.
Leaving the animals was always really hard for us. And long flights have become almost impossible for Craig with his back issues. Now with a baby, we wanted somewhere we could go that felt like our home away from home. And for us, that’s Vermont.
Similar to Aquidneck Island, the market in Woodstock is crazy. Our biggest hurdle was finding something we could actually afford. There’s not much. Buying a house in another state during Covid had its own set of challenges. We had to make offers sight unseen and most homes were getting multiple offers the day they came on the market. We didn’t have a specific style in mind. And we just knew we wanted to be in Woodstock or neighboring towns like Barnard, Pomfret or Bridgewater. Throughout the process we made two offers on houses we really loved. We were outbid with offers over asking price both times. We were a bit frustrated and feeling like we just couldn’t compete with buyers in that market. Houses don’t come on often in that area, and even less in our price range.
A house popped up two days after we had been outbid for the second time.
It was in a dream location and sure enough, it was a ranch. We decided to make an offer and agreed if we were outbid again we’d take a break and rethink the whole thing. After some negotiating, our offer was accepted. And we had never even stepped foot in the house.
I think I held my breath the entire drive up for the inspection because we were already so invested I knew we’d be crushed if something really bad popped up. Long story short, the inspection went well. We were on our way to being homeowners in Vermont. The house definitely needs work. It’s in similar condition to our house when we bought it. And it will need renovations throughout. But for the most part it’s all things we can do on our own.
The Vermont house is smaller than our island house but it has a much bigger yard and an amazing location (we are within walking distance to Woodstock Village). It needs an entire renovation, inside and outside. So we definitely have our work cut out for us. I was looking through a folder of images from our first trip to Woodstock and realized that it was exactly two years ago to the day that we biked around Woodstock Village for the first time, and by the end of it said to each other “we need to live here.” There’s been a lot of places we’ve traveled to that we love, but nothing has felt more like home than Vermont.
We haven’t quite decided how we plan to get started, but I’m so excited to share this process with you.
Of course we’ve been planning for months but it’s hard to know what makes sense until you’re actually living in the space. It will get cold much quicker here so we want to get going as soon as possible. More renovation content to come in the weeks ahead, and of course lots of foliage photos because Vermont in the fall is just magic. Thanks as always for your love and support, we are beyond excited to bring you along on this next chapter.
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