Welcome to The White Pine Home, my home decor and lifestyle blog, i.e. my welcome retreat and opportunity for creativity! Where does our story begin, I can start from the very beginning when I was a little girl, or from when I met my husband and the spark of events that our meeting ignited, or I can save you the long essay and just start a few months ago when we found our DREAM HOME after more than 2 years of endless searching!!
After having lived in our simple starter home for 6 years, having had 2 beautiful girls brought home from the hospital there, having done countless fixer-upper projects, it was time for a change. We embarked on quite the journey, but we had to decide whether we wanted to build on our 1 acre lot in the Suburbs, or find an existing home. As many people can relate, it’s tough to find a home that provides all the specifics us somewhat picky people can be searching for, so the concept of designing and building your own home is incredibly appealing. Despite the intimidating draw backs of building a home, we decided to go for it, hesitantly so, as my husband was always weary of the time, expense, and stress. So as we designed our home over the course of 14 months, he continued to search the market, and we dedicated many weekends to visiting open houses. When it was time to finally pull the trigger and finalize our permits, we found this GEM, our dream house, toothbrush ready… it was hard to make an argument to continue with our custom home, as we were making many concessions that we had never expected having to make. And truthfully, we had fallen in love.
Turns out this dream house of ours was actually several other peoples’ dream house as well, and having only been on the market for 1 week and having made an offer, we were outbid!!! Nightmare, our hearts sank, we couldn’t believe it was gone. We had already dreamed up where to put our furniture, what colors we would paint the walls, how many get-togethers we would host. And just like that the house was sold. We moved on, continued our debate, build or buy, and one afternoon, we got a call from our Realtor. He says, “the house is back”!!! What? We didn’t understand, until he explained the house had been sold to the buyers that outbid us, and then those same people had to relocate for work unexpectedly, wow… there’s more to that story but the long and short of it was that they needed to sell, and quickly.
We took our chance, made an offer right away, and voila!! We were moved in by November of 2018. It was unreal considering the journey it took to find this home. The conversation with our architect was painful, it was hard to let go of a project we had been working on for so long, and had become attached to. But this house was everything we wanted, and provided so much more than what we had planned with our new construction home. There are still so many projects and opportunities in this home, and so many ideas we have to make it our own. I hope you will follow along on our journey to making this home our little piece of heaven on Earth.
