Welcome to our home!

We purchased our home in December 2020. It was a new build in a brand new section of an established neighborhood. The house was nearly complete when we put in our offer, so we didn’t have the opportunity to make any customizations. If we are being completely honest, though, we were just happy to have a house.

On the day we found out I was pregnant with our son (September 9, 2020), our offer was accepted on a totally different house in a very different neighborhood.

We were so excited!

We were excited to move into a larger home with a more modern feel.

We were ready to have a fresh start.

Although I loved the home we were selling… I couldn’t wait to get out of it. It was an older ranch-style home that was built in the 70s. The house had been updated only a couple of years before I purchased it in 2017, but we spent the better part of our first year of marriage (2018-2019) in homeowner’s hell.

What we thought was a minor issue with the laminate flooring in the hallway turned out to be long-term moisture damage that spanned the entire length of the home. At one point, I even fell through the floor. It took me three months to get our insurance company to agree to pay for the damages.

I’ll save you most of the gory details, but here’s a list of the highlights:

• We lived in a hotel (with two of our dogs and a cat) while a less-than-awesome construction company pulled up all of our home’s flooring, subfloor, and floor joists.
• Most of our furniture was moved – very haphazardly – into a storage pod + U-Haul sitting in the driveway.
• Tayler and I would check on their progress a few times a week. Initially, the contractor had estimated one week to complete the project. One week turned into two months. Two months turned into what seemed like infinity.
• At some point, I got tired of fighting with the insurance company over the length of our hotel stay, and we moved back into the house. We lived in one of the spare bedrooms for four months.
• The construction company did not update the subflooring in any of the three bedrooms; they just laid the new floor down and figured we would never notice… until a joist broke in one room.
• Our insurance company had paid the contractor to update the flooring in the hall bath. They didn’t even bust the tile up in that room. We took a year off before contracting a different company (who were fantastic) to come in and fix the hall bath.

Our home was a construction site from September 2018 until July 2020. To say we were ready to move on was a gross understatement. However, real estate is a funny thing, and God had other plans.

In November, we were supposed to have a gender reveal party at the new house. We hadn’t told any of our grandparents we were expecting yet, and we wanted it to be a complete surprise. And then, all of the contingencies fell through…

I was convinced that old house was built on an Indian burial ground.

Tayler and I went on a house hunting spree – perks of being married to the realtor.

We looked at a few houses in the neighborhood that we would eventually settle into. Our house was the smallest but had the largest lot in the subdivision. With four dogs (at the time) and a little boy on the way, we decided more yard was probably our best bet.

On Friday, December 18, 2020, after two weeks of me living in my parents’ basement (four hours away) with all of our dogs and Tayler sleeping on an air mattress at a friend’s townhouse back in Charleston… we spent our first night in our new home.

As I type this today, there are half-finished projects all around me. I am re-painting the board and batten we added to the hallway, there’s an art project in the living room that needs some touch-ups, and our patio is in a perpetual state of “in progress”. I am full of ideas and empty on energy. But every night, I climb into bed, so very thankful for this home.

I am thankful for a beautiful neighborhood to raise our family, a safe place for my son to lay his head down at night, and a big backyard for our dogs to look out at from the living room couch.

It has been quite the journey for us, but we’re here.

We’ve made it.

Welcome.

Written by:

Chelsea Fulton