We Bought a House!

I graduated from San Jose State with an B.A. in Communication Studies back in May 2010. I know what you're thinking... "Cool, what does this have to do with buying a house?" Well, if you would have told me that in three years I'd have my masters in Tax Accounting, be working for a Big Four firm, be engaged to someone I hadn't met yet at that point, and own a house I would have laughed in yo' face.

But well, here we are!

The stories of the change in career and meeting Mike are for another post. This is all about why/how we bought a house. When Mike first mentioned buying a house I thought the idea was straight-up crazy. We had a perfectly good place where we saved tons of money a month and lived within a mile of all of our friends & the restaurants/stores we frequented. But then about six months ago someone was shot on our block. Like we are talking drive-by, gang related murder. Guaranteed Campbell hasn't had a homicide since 2007, but none-the-less it shook us from our little happy place and made me start to realize the things I had been ignoring that I really wasn't crazy about (the lack of privacy, how loud it was, the fact that our apartment frequently smelled like cigarettes from people sitting in the courtyard smoking).

My only hang-up at that point was that Mike and I weren't engaged yet and although I was sure he was the One, in my book, that needed to come first. To my surprise, he popped the question on a perfect day in Napa at one of our favorite wineries. After we floated back down from Cloud 9, we started to look at if we could realistically buy a place (lucky for us Mike's dad is a loan officer and ran some numbers for us). Turned out yes, we could buy a place, but that it would be really tight. Good thing Mike is one of the most frugal people I know so after breaking down a monthly budget we know we could stick to, we decided to start looking. Our parameters were as follows, broken up by what we must have and what we would like:

"Must"

• Price: Under 550K 
• Location: within walking distance to downtown Campbell, Willow Glen, or Los Gatos
• Space: at least 2 Br / 1.5 Ba
• Must have private outdoor space for the grill 
• Must have a garage for all Mike's biking gear

"Want"

• Hardwood floors throughout
• An open layout where the Kitchen is integrated into the main living area
• Single family house (rather than condo).

We definitely got all of our must-haves and did get hardwood in the bottom story of the townhouse so that is a start! Although it technically is not a single family house, we are content to only have neighbors sharing one wall with us. Plus the fact that there is a large green space in back of our patio makes it really feel like we have room to breath here.

Yesterday's post was mostly photos (and I promise a tour of the new place is coming soon) but for now here is layout of our new place!