As you are reading this, I am waking up for the very first time in Kansas City, Missouri, my new home as of June 1. I hinted at it in the past but I can now officially share that over the course of the last three months, my husband and I have been quietly working away to make our biggest collaboration yet a reality. We bought a house in Kansas City! If this comes as a surprise to you, you are not alone. It comes as a huge surprise to the two of us as well! It is a gigantic move and leap of faith but we are both more than ready to start this exciting new chapter.
Following my diagnosis with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome last year, we were forced to take a serious look at how the disease would impact both of our lives going forward. We had a number of difficult conversations about the changes we would need to make to keep me as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Living a calmer, slower-paced life was the underlying theme that kept coming up throughout the course of those conversations and, eventually, that pull became too strong to ignore.
The thing with getting diagnosed with a chronic illness is that you grieve…hard. I found, as I moved through this grief, that I began to ask myself deeper questions about how I wanted my life with my husband to look going forward. As the months went on, I began to realize that the life I was envisioning for me and my husband was no longer possible on the West Coast due to one thing and one thing only, the astronomical cost of housing.
To give you some perspective, a studio apartment in our LA neighborhood costs over half a million dollars right now. That is insane. I would not pay that much for so little space even if I was able to. Living in Los Angeles simply is not worth that price to us anymore. We looked at other cities on the West Coast but, due to the fact my husband’s career is dependent upon us living within close proximity to a professional soccer team, our West Coast options were limited to cities with nearly equally as high costs of living.
As we began to expand our potential home search we discovered a phenomenon we positively could not ignore. We were both way more excited about leaving the West Coast behind and having a new life experience than we were about staying put. We eventually narrowed our search down to several cities and, after I made an epic pros and cons list, settled on Kansas City, Missouri.
Kansas City offers most of what we ranked as important – professional sports teams, an active arts presence, every musical act we could think of rolls through the city, and KC has an incredible food and beer scene. It also offered us an opportunity we never imagined possible – to purchase a house outright for the amount a down payment would cost us in Los Angeles. The thought of having a roof over our heads, regardless of what happens to me physically as the years go on and EDS takes its toll, is an incredibly emotional one for me and it is something that still moves me to tears because I am SO GRATEFUL for this opportunity. Our sweet little house has already provided us with so much hope and has given me something I haven’t felt since my diagnoses in April of 2017, a chance to catch my breath.
We began our house hunt in late February, aiming to find our house on the trip to Kansas City that we are currently on. In preparation for this May trip, my husband and I were both obsessively searching for houses on Zillow and had already found a realtor to work with by mid-March. One night in late March, the cutest little blue cottage we had ever seen popped up in our email and we both fell in love. It was by no means perfect, but it felt like home and it felt like hope. We called our realtor in the morning, sent her over to walk through it with us on the phone and, ultimately, purchased it sight unseen for over the asking price because we ended up in a bidding war agains all investors. It happened so fast, it has taken us a while to process what we did! We just knew it was meant to be OUR house.
My husband flew back to see the house after our offer was accepted and was present for the home inspection. Our house is indeed as sweet and charming as it appeared in the photos and I can not wait to finally see it in person for the very first time this morning. The house is a small three bedroom, one bath house built in 1956 with a lovely, grassy back yard for the pups. It is much more space and land than we ever dreamt of being able to own on the West Coast and, honestly, it all still feels like a bit of a dream! This last year was incredibly painful and challenging for both me and my husband. To have this house waiting for us at the end of this last push feels like an incredible gift.
Our move is coming right together. Movers are booked, our road trip out to Kansas City with the dogs is planned, painters have been hired to transform the more “challenging” existing paint colors into calm and soothing spaces, and, as I am sure you would guess, I have already planned every detail about how I am decorating each of our spaces in our new house. The only thing left to do is pack up our lives, load the dogs in the car, and hit the road.
Thanks to our sweet little house, Musings on Momentum is going to be undergoing some exciting changes this year. My husband and I will be focusing our time and energy on fixing up our house and making it into a home and I will be blogging about the process every step of the way. It is an exciting, fresh start for me and my husband, as well as for Musings on Momentum, and I am more ready than I have ever been for a fresh start.