When I started this blog, I mentioned I was at the crossroads of two major life experiences, marriage and homeownership, and I promised  I would blog about both. As you can see, I’ve mentioned pretty much nil about the later. This didn’t happen because I became lazy or too busy, but because the experience was just too heart wrenching and raw for me to want to talk about in the  moment. But now that I have purchased a home and lived in it long enough to realize it does actually belong to me,  I’ll probably be writing about the experience  more often.

Before I tell our story, I want to say that buying your first home is not going to be easy. In this market, the first thing people say when you mention your desire to purchase a home is (in an extremely gushy voice) “Oh, that’s just wonderful! This is the best time to do it. It’s a buyers’ market!” Anyone who says this to you is either a liar or does not know what he is talking about. Well, it is a buyers’  market if you have millions of dollars to throw down and are simply buying an investment property. But, if like my fiance and I, you  are on a limited budget and have been pinching every extra penny for the past several years to put towards a down payment, you are in for a bumpy ride my friend. I would not recommend buying a home to anyone in our financial situation who has a heart condition, limited patience or anger management issues. But don’t let my dreary tone make you give up. If you have patience and a strong will, buying a home is doable and can be an extremely transformative and rewarding experience.  I imagine in some ways it may be similar to childbirth, agonizingly painful, but you come out of the experience as a different, stronger person.

As for Luke and I, we have wanted to own a home for many years and have tucked away all extra cash towards this goal, and I mean all extra cash.  We don’t buy new clothes, we rarely eat out, and we only see movies at the dollar theater…I can’t even remember the last time I actually had a professional haircut, and this is a huge thing for a girl to give up. I know you are probably wondering why this is so important to us. We are young and have our whole lives ahead of us. But for Luke and I, this is something we truly needed. We probably aren’t going to be world travelers; we aren’t into the club scene–we are what I would lovingly describe as creative homebodies. We enjoy staying at home and working on projects together, such as building, painting and working outside. So paying rent on property we can’t do anything to really wasn’t our style. We needed something we could make our own.

Needless to say, when we had enough saved up to start the home-buying process, we threw ourselves in head first. We read all the books, watched all the shows,  interviewed lenders and made a list of all our “must haves” for a home. Luckily, we already had a personal relationship with an amazing realtor, Rebecca Dehmer. 

As soon as we had a pre-approval, we went out to look at homes. In our first weekend of searching, we probably looked at 20 plus properties and fell in love with and made offers on several of them. For a first weekend, things were rolling along great!

But then Monday hit, and our lender called to tell us we were actually only qualified for $50,ooo less than originally quoted. This news came as quite a blow since we were already looking in an extremely limited price range, especially for California. We had to take all of our offers back , and we could no longer afford a single-family home (the first bullet on our “must-have” list). We had to start over from scratch and look at condos.

At least, I thought, we would be able to afford a nice condo…think again. During the next weeks and months to follow, Luke and I had to cross pretty much all of our “must haves” off, one by one…garage…second bedroom…backyard…laundry room. And even when we found something we could live with, we were competing against hundreds of other buyers out there who were also taking advantage of this “buyers’ market,” and many of these buyers were either paying cash, non-FHA or had a huge down, which immediately threw us out of the running.  It took three months before we finally had an offer accepted on a condo that had none of our original requirements. Take it from me, do not make a “must have” list unless you enjoy crying .

But we were happy to finally have an offer accepted and hoped the process would be over soon…it would not. We still had numerous financial hoops to jump through that I am not even going to go into here and as the property we offered on was a short sale, we had to wait for the bank to also approve our offer.  We made the offer in August and were still waiting to hear back from the bank in November.

The best recommendation I can make from our experience is to find a good realtor. Your realtor becomes one of your closest friends and personal cheerleader for when things get tough, and they will. You need to feel comfortable with your realtor, so take your time in finding someone who suites your personality and is good at her job. If you live in Southern California, I highly recommend contacting our realtor, Rebecca Dehmer. She has the biggest heart of almost anyone I have ever met and worked tirelessly to find us a good home. When we wanted to throw in the towel, she kept our spirits up. When we were competing against many buyers, she came up with strategies to make our offer stand out.  I honestly don’t think we would own a home if it were not for her.  There are no words to truly express our gratitude.

In the end, it was our realtor’s creative strategizing that got us our home. When we still hadn’t heard back from the bank, Becky decided it was time for us to start looking again. And she found a condo that had almost all of the requirements on our original “must have” list. When we saw it, we knew this home was the one.  She had us make an offer on its first day on the market, and she made our offer competitive enough that we were in contract the next day. A few nail-biting financial hoops and hundreds of signatures later, the condo was ours, and we were able to move in one week before Christmas.

I’ve come to the conclusion there’s a reason buying your first home is so hard. It’s a rite of passage where you have to earn the responsibility of homeownership. If you can make it through all the many disappointments and give up some of the unrealistic expectations you held coming into the process, you are probably ready to own a home. There’s a reason we didn’t get any of those homes we thought were “perfect.” They weren’t our home. And we had to go through the hardships to actually recognize our home when it found us.

If you live in southern California and would like more information on Rebecca Dehmer please visit her site: http://www.rebeccadehmer.com/yourhome.htm

Recently, Luke and I have begun the tedious process of interviewing vendors for our wedding day.  And, it’s much more involved than I originally expected. I thought I would call a caterer, florist, baker, tell him or her our budget and provide a general idea of what we want, and they would quote me a cookie-cutter package for brides on my extremely-limited budget.

Luckily, all of the vendors we have chosen love working with budget brides because it requires them to flex their creative muscles.  But to give me my dream wedding, they need something to go off of, such as fabric swatches, paint chips, photos… anything for inspiration.  At first I was a little overwhelmed because I could picture what I wanted, but had not invested the time to go searching for symbols of my vision.  What was I to do?

Then I found WeddingWire.  It’s a site similar to theKnot, but has a more collective feel. Brides and grooms post reviews for thousands of local vendors and even photos from their own weddings for other couples to get ideas from.

While I haven’t spent an enormous amount of time delving into the depths of the site’s features, I found their Inspiration Boards extremely useful for organizing my ideas.  The Inspiration Boards allow brides to scour WeddingWire’s vast collection of bridal photos and create themed collages for vendors.  Brides can search for inspiration by narrowing the photos by specific categories (e.g., flowers, cakes, dresses, hair) and colors of their choosing.  When you see something you like, you add it to your Inspiration Board.  WeddingWire allows you to create as many Inspiration Boards as you want, and all the photos you select can be rearranged, resized and flipped to your heart’s delight. The end product looks professional and was something I was proud to show off.  And, I didn’t have to lug around a bunch of cumbersome knickknacks to all of my vendor interviews.

I created two Inspiration Boards, one for cupcake wedding cakes and the other for flowers. My vendors loved them! I am sure I’ll be making many more because it’s really fun.  I’ve included these for your viewing pleasure.  Enjoy!

http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/LucasFairchild&ElizabethRoberts

I really didn’t want to do a wedding website because A, they look extremely time consuming, and B, I didn’t want to get wrapped up in mushy wedding stuff.  However, I finally decided to suck it up and make one because I’d be able to easily provide useful information to our guests, such as local hotels, bridal party information, area attractions, etc. And heck, I think I’m even starting to like the mushy stuff.

I scoured the search engines looking for a company that would allow me to easily build a navigable site for free. I found many companies that offered free websites if you agreed to sign up for various free trials for wedding-related products and many others that were simply just too complicated.  I didn’t want any of these.  Finally, I settled on the wedding website offered by www.theknot.com.  It’s free and extremely easy to understand.  All you have to do is pick a template based on your color scheme and fill in the text for various predetermined page categories.  You can turn off any pages you don’t feel like including, e.g., I turned off the Registry Page since we haven’t gotten that far yet. This was all extremely useful for me since I have very little HTML/code experience.

When it came to actually writing the content for our site, I wanted to avoid making our readers nauseas with overly sappy love fluff, but I still wanted to give a little insight into how our relationship started and who we are today.  I tried to accomplish this by keeping the paragraphs brief and in some cases writing about our relationship in the third person, which I am really not used to doing.  The third-person perspective allowed me to look at our relationship as a whole and make a site that better represented both of us.

I’ve included a link to our site below. This was my first attempt, so I’m sure it will continue to evolve as we get closer to the wedding date.  I hope it’s an enjoyable read and doesn’t make your stomach too green.  However, I couldn’t help but sprinkle it with some of my favorite engagement photos.

Enjoy!

Ahem, so I am recanting my position on the bridal warehouse stores….or at least the one I visited today. I have been avoiding these types of stores because, from what I found browsing the Internet, I couldn’t find a dress that felt unique and didn’t look cheap.  However, I was lured into a David’s Bridal today by their one hundred dollar dress sale.  I brought my friend Michelle with me to protect me from pushy salespeople who might talk me into a really expensive dress.  I’m an easy target.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by our experience. My girlfriend and I were able to talk our time sorting through dresses, and besides one salesman who flirted a tad too much, everyone left us alone until I was ready to try on a couple gowns. When we were ready, I was escorted by a bridal consultant to the changing rooms.  She patiently helped me get in and out of every delicate dress, which would have been a confusing nightmare if I had tried on my own.  She also noted the different styles I liked and found similar dresses that I had missed.  I’m really happy to have had this extra help.

I tried about six of seven dresses and really loved three of them.  I feel pretty lucky since most of the brides I’ve known had to search a long time for their perfect dress.  While the dresses aren’t as cheap as I had hoped, they are still extremely affordable.  I’ll be happy knowing that I bought a dress that I feel extremely beautiful in, but one that I didn’t have to take out a credit card for.

If you would like to see some of the dresses I tried on during my David’s Bridal Adventure, visit here.

Thanks Michelle for being my partner in crime today.

The first of many beautiful dresses.

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In the year that I’ve been out of college, I’ve been in what I can only describe as a funk.  I’ve just had this sinking feeling that I’m not doing anything worthy with my life. Yeah, yeah, I know this is  not completely true, but still…  I guess what I am probably suffering from is post-college blues.  During college, I felt that I was destined for great things.  I didn’t know what these great things were, but the future had a shiny, golden aura around it.  I spent my nights imagining myself teaching underprivileged children to read, writing ground-breaking theses, or finding the cure to Malaria…all I had to do was earn my Bachelor’s Degree and the adventures would begin.  After graduation however, these great accomplishments never came.  I got a desk job and quickly settled into the grind of a 40-hour work week. At the end of the day, there never seemed to be time to start those great things.  At least, that’s the excuse I gave myself.

Recently, however, my friend Rebecca unknowingly pointed me in the right direction.  Her friend was struggling to pass the written portion an entrance exam, and knowing that I’m a writer, Rebecca recommended her to me for tutoring. Tutoring has always been a passion of mine, but after college, I didn’t have as many opportunities to do it. I began working with Rebecca’s friend once a week.  And, there’s been nothing more rewarding than seeing her apply and understand the techniques we’ve gone over.  In fact, in the days following our meetings, I practically have a runner’s high. I feel as though I have rediscovered something I’ve always known I loved, but had abandoned. While I’m not changing the world, I am helping someone by sharing my love for writing.   And, I can finally say that I’ve found that feeling of satisfaction I’ve been missing.

I want to look and feel beautiful on my wedding day, but I don’t want to throw down a lot of money on the dress…because, honestly, I am only going to wear it once.  I’m looking for something in the $500 dollar range or under.  At the begining of my search, all I was finding in this price range were dresses at the bridal warehouse stores.  All of the dresses looked the same to me, cheap.

Recently, however, one of my good friends turned me onto an incredible store, Unique Vintage, that carries vintage-inspired dresses  from almost every decade, and all of them are under $400.  I think the dresses are extremely beautiful, and the store has something for every style,  from retro chic to classic elegance.   I thought I would share the site with anyone has found themselves in a similar dilemma, http://www.unique-vintage.com/.  The store is based in Burbank, CA, but they can ship anywhere.  It’s only about an hour’s drive from me, and I plan on making a road trip there very soon.

Here’s a link to the dress I’m eyeing: http://www.unique-vintage.com/1950s-vintage-style-length-wedding-dress-bolero-p-2749.html

I like to consider myself to be somewhat of a foodie.  I don’t go to restaurants very often, but there’s nothing I enjoy more than putting together a meal for friends and family.  My only problem is that I don’t usually work off of recipes or write down the ingredients for what I create, so every meal is a little bit different each time.  My friend Melissa has been asking me to send her something, so I finally put pen to paper and worked out the measurements and ingredients. The recipe below is for a shrimp and Gorgonzola pasta I came up with. It’s extremely fattening and delicious… my roommates can attest to this.  Enjoy!

Gorgonzola and Shrimp Pasta

• Ingredients:
• 2 cups peeled and deveined shrimp
• 4.5 oz. Gorgonzola cheese
• 1 teaspoon corn starch
• 1 tablespoon fresh chopped sage
• ½ cup heavy or whipping cream
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 4 tablespoons chopped spring onions (Only cut up the white crunchy part. Throw away the green part or use as chives later.)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 3 roma tomatoes
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 bag (17 oz.) pasta of choice
• Salt, chili powder and pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Serves 4.

Directions:

1. Sauté minced garlic, chopped onion, and sage in one tablespoon of olive oil and set aside.
2. Cook shrimp and diced tomatoes in two tablespoons of butter and three table spoons of lemon juice until shrimp is pink on both sides. Add salt and pepper to taste. Drain the shrimp and tomatoes of the butter and lemon juice, pouring the remaining juice and butter into a small bowl.  Keep shrimp and sauce warm and set aside.
3. Melt two tablespoons of butter in a heavy saucepan. Add Gorgonzola cheese, and stir over a gentle heat for 2-3 minutes until the cheese is melted.
4. Pour in cream and cornstarch, whisking together well.  Add the shrimp, tomatoes, garlic, onion, and sage and stir together.  For a little extra kick, add a dash of chili powder. Continue whisking the sauce until it boils and thickens.  Set aside.
5. Boil pasta in salted water, according to the cooking instructions on the package. Drain and rinse the pasta, then lightly coat the pasta with the butter and lemon juice sauce from earlier.
6. Reheat the Gorgonzola sauce gently, whisking well. Divide the pasta among four serving bowls, top with the Gorgonzola sauce.  Serve immediately.

One of the areas where Luke and I have decided to spend a larger portion of our wedding budget is photography. We believe that after all the excitement of our wedding day subsides, our photos will be our most valuable purchase because they will help us remember the day, which, according to all the wives I’ve spoken to, goes by in a flash.  As part of our wedding photography, we decided to invest in engagement photos.  Luke and I don’t have a lot of photos of us together, except for ones we have taken ourselves.   These tend to mostly be those awkward, up-the-nose shots from one of us holding the camera out while we smush our heads together, trying to get in frame.  We felt that engagement photos were very much needed in order to update our “collection” with some decent photography.  Also, they will make great gifts for friends and family in the days leading up to our wedding.

While we are devoting more of our budget to photography, we still don’t have a lot to spend.  We had to be creative and flexible in our search for affordable photography.  I began my search on Craigslist, looking for photography students who might be willing to take our pictures for free or for a reduced fee if they could use our photos in their portfolio.  I found several students willing to do this on craigslist, and we exchanged emails and links to their flickr pages. However, none of their portfolios really had the caliber of work that I was looking for.  But we did find a professional photographer who was looking to expand his portfolio with romantic couples’ photography.  He gave us a FREE, one-hour shoot at a local sculpture garden.  We got some great photos from this experience.  However, the location and our poses were of his choosing because these were, after all, for his portfolio.  For us, many of the pictures came out looking a little staged, so we decided to find a paid photographer that would allow us to call a few more of the shots.

In the end, we found a wonderful photographer, also on Craigslist, Julie Taylor.  She has incredibly reasonable prices.  We paid $225 for a 2-hour beach shoot, which also included a high resolution CD of all our photos, 1 11 x 14 print, and 25 custom  save-the-dates.  We met her around sunset at Treasure Island Beach in Laguna.  She took photos of us in several outfits in varied locations throughout the park, so it looked like our photos were from several different shoots.  She was also incredible with sunset lighting. Some of our photos looked like they were ripped straight out of a magazine.  If you would like to see our photos and more examples of her work, go to http://www.ocsweetphoto.com/.  I highly recommend her.  She quickly responded to all of my email questions and was incredibly knowledgeable of locations.  She was also one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met.  We are definitely hoping to use her for our wedding.

Wedding Budget: $5,000

Spent to date: $225

One of the first things my fiancée Luke and I have done in planning for our wedding is to decide exactly how much we are willing to spend on our wedding and what we are willing to spend our money on.  We have decided that we are comfortable with a budget of $5,000.  I know this sounds almost impossible, as even a budget wedding is considered to usually be around $10-15,ooo, but we are going to cut corners in as many areas as possible.  With such a limited budget, we’ve really had to nail-down what we want to put money towards for our wedding.  My, soon-to-be, sister-in-law had a beautiful wedding a few years ago, and she gave me some of the best advice I have received to date for planning our budget.  She told me that for all the trinkets marketed to brides (fancy souvenirs, table dressings, personalized candies), they didn’t end up meaning that much on the actual day because it went by in such a flash.  In the end, her best investments were in services that helped to preserve the day for her, such as photography and videography.  So these are the areas where Luke and I are going to focus most of our budget.  We’re going to cut out most of the trendy extras, which probably won’t mean much the day after our wedding anyway. And, we’re going to do everything that we can ourselves or by “hiring” members of our family to help out.  We’ve picked three main areas where we are willing to spend our money: food, alcohol, and pictures.

With this blog, I am going to record my memories and ponderings during our engagement and also keep track of our spending so that we don’t go over budget.

At the end of each blog, I’ll record exactly what we’ve spent to date here:

Wedding Budget: $5,000

Spent to date: $0