Finding My Home (Part 5)

In Finding My Home (Part 4, I talked about the fears my husband and I associated with homeownership, the importance of learning to trust each other, and some of the things we did to build trust within our marriage, which allowed us to get to a place where we felt ready to buy our own home.

Today, I’m going to discuss the fourth thing we did in order to strengthen that trust and communication.

Part 5. Explain the “Why”

Everytime I make a big decision, I always seem to forget that, for me, understanding “the why” behind doing something makes the decision itself so much easier.

In fact, I think it may actually be the most important part of the decision-making process.

That’s not 100% of the time, mind you. Like, I know why I should make healthier choices when I eat, but that doesn’t stop me from pounding a sleeve of Oreos when the situation calls for it. But knowing the why behind making healthier eating choices still helps.

Sometimes, my back hurts.

Why?

Because I’m overweight for my height and have a weak core. If I made healthier choices when I ate, and did more crunches, my back wouldn’t hurt as much (probably).

I applied this same rationale to most decisions I made in life.

I’m bringing a sweater to dinner.

Why? It’s summer.

Because that restaurant always pumps the AC way high, so I’m always cold when we eat there.

All I needed to do was apply this same thought process to buying a house, but for some reason, I didn’t.

I want a house.

Why?

…

Cuz! I just do, okay! Everyone else has one. Why do I need to justify my reasoning?

Turns out, the answer was because I wouldn’t be the only one impacted by the decision to buy a home, and it’s a pretty impactful one.

I’m going to pivot for a moment and give you a little backstory.

We got married in 2008, and around our second year of marriage—like many other Americans in 2010—my husband lost his job. That was freaking hard and we struggled financially for a really long time. Even after he got another job, it took us a long time to get back to a place where we felt financially stable.

And even when we did eventually feel somewhat financially stable, as I talked about in Part 1, we weren’t in a great place of trust. And that made it hard for us to want to commit to any large, long-term decision.

When we finally made the decision to buy a home, I still couldn’t really explain why I wanted a home. I just knew I did. Most people my age had one, and they seemed really happy, and I wanted to be really happy, so I wanted one too, dammit!

We also couldn’t shake the fear of a repeat recession. We had struggled with money for so long, so the idea of making a big financial commitment to something like a mortgage almost gave us hives when we considered it.

Now, for the most part, I don’t care for grey areas, you know what I mean? I’m a decisive person and I like to make decisions and have the assurance that I know what I want, and why I want it, even if I may never get it. So, in order to overcome this feeling of uncertainty, I resolved to find answers to why I wanted a home.

I decided to talk to people I knew who owned their own homes, and I only asked them three questions:

1. Do you own your own home?
2. Why did you choose to buy a home?
3. Are you happy owning your own home?

I was super surprised with the answers I got. I talked to like twenty people and I realized that, though their answers were fine, their reasoning for owning a home was weak. It was almost as if they were surprised that I was asking them such a silly question. In fact, the majority of them didn’t really seem to have solid answers as to why they had wanted to own their own home in the first place.

Only like three people gave me specific, determined answers as to why they wanted to own their own home. Two of them referenced the potential tax breaks, and the third guy admitted that he regretted buying his home and only did it because his wife wanted one.

So, now it was my turn. I started thinking about why I wanted to own my own home, and it took me about a month before I came up with what I felt was a solid list of reasons. My husband and I talked about it for a long time, and he came up with some of his own reasons, but here were mine:

1. Permanence

I want to feel a permanence in my life that I’ll probably never feel in my mind. I have ADD which makes me beautiful, unique, and interesting. It also makes things like traditional learning, focus, sensory input, emotional control, and memory adeptness a huge chore. I want my life to reflect a mental stability that I will probably never be able to achieve in my head. There are times when my thoughts are so chaotic that I have to close my eyes and breath past the confusion just to remember my own name. It’s busy, and stressful, and I both love and hate (mostly love) the way it has shaped me as a person.

That being said, the way I live my life doesn’t have to reflect the makeup of my brain. In fact, I actually thrive in an environment that’s based on repetition, routine, and low risk. I’m not saying that I couldn’t have that in an apartment, but I feel like it’s easier to achieve in a house you own yourself.

Owning a home means not having to think about where you’ll move to the next time your rent goes up, or whether or not you can play Rock Band at 10:01 PM because we’ve hit quiet hours and you know that your downstairs neighbor has to be up at 4:00 AM. I want to feel free to set a routine and live it. I want to feel the permanence that comes from knowing that I own the thing I’m living in and can choose to live however I wish. Maybe it’s the same regardless if you live in a house or an apartment, but it feels different to me, and that difference makes my brain feel in control and stable, even if it is just an illusion cooked up by a big bank to get more of my money.

2. It’s scary

I want to do things that I think are hard or scary. I think this is one of the dumbest reasons I am using to justify my decision to buy a house. There are probably tons of other things I could do that I perceive as big or hard or scary. Hell, I’m 35 years old and terrified to go camping without my parents. In one weekend in the Uintas, I could probably achieve the same feeling as I have buying this house and save a lot more money. The problem is that camping wouldn’t really be that much of a stretch. Sure it’s scary but I’d probably be fine and I know tons of people who would be willing to help me.

In owning my own home, I’m taking a huge financial risk and agreeing to own all the potential troubles that may come along with it. Again, I have no doubt that I am a victim of “big bank’s” homeowner propaganda or the invisible rules that society puts on me as the “right” way to live. I guess I’m okay with that. It’s big and scary and hard and I want to try it.

3. I want a garden

Gardening in an apartment sucks. If you’ve ever tried it, you know I’m right. I get that you can do it, but it’s not the same as planting something in the earth, under all that sun, in a place that you own yourself (once you’ve paid off the mortgage). In an apartment, I’d get worried about what to do when the plant grows too big for those second-hand boots I got at the thrift store or how I’d have to convince my neighbor to let me put my plants by his front door because his apartment faced an optimal direction for sun exposure.

I am more excited about the outside of my new home then I am about the inside. I cannot wait to dig my hands into the soil and rip up weeds. That’s right, you heard me—I want to weed. And no, weeding someone else’s yard isn’t the same. I don’t want to do a bunch of work to pull up the weeds in someone else’s yard only to secretly observe whether or not they choose to keep it up after I’ve finished. I want to weed every freaking day and see how the yard changes over time. I want to buy a wide brimmed hat and put SPF 2,000 on my nose and get my hands literally dirty. Even if everything dies after the first week (a prospect I’m already anticipating because I don’t care for research) I’ll still be excited to try again. I cannot wait to plant stuff in my own yard.

That’s it. Only three reasons. They don’t seem like much do they? That’s okay. I know it’s what I want and when I finally made the decision, I was pleasantly surprised at how very calm I felt at that moment. Making the decision was scary, but I felt better knowing that I had actually decided to do it because it’s what I wanted for myself as opposed to doing it because it’s what everyone else was doing. It felt real in a new way that helped me move onto the next step.

In part six of Finding My Home, I'll talk about how we learned that saying we’ll do something isn’t enough—we had to actually tackle our financial strains first before qualifying for the mortgage rate we wanted.