Recently I noticed that home prices were going up. I started checking out what our current Chateau de Mont (a flipped house in the not-nicest but not-worst neighborhood in Orem) was worth, as well as the value on the home Jon owned when we met (a little bungalow in Provo). After getting some numbers, and realizing that we could sell them both and get a healthy down payment on a new house, we made the call to start shopping.

My least favorite thing about our home is that it’s old, and has what I’m going to generously call “non-compliant with 21st century code” features. For example, the wiring is aluminum, which was apparently legal around here for about a decade, and our house happened to be on the tail end of that, before they realized that aluminum wiring starts fires. The pipes are also ancient, the available amperage is half what it should be by modern standards, the kitchen is painfully tiny, we’ve spent thousands on just fixing things over the last year, and I can hear the kids in the room above us whispering. It sounds like they’re bowling every night before bed. Jon’s house costs us in repairs and maintenance regularly as well, and even though we’re renting it out, it hasn’t been financially worthwhile yet. So, maybe I pushed Jon a little towards a new house. I told him I’d rather own one nice, new home than two scraggly-ass old houses.

I mean, they were nice houses, and they’re hopefully nice houses for the people buying them. I was just over it.

Besides that, I loooooooove looking at new houses. I don’t even need to be in the market to want to look at new houses. I like looking through houses in the process of being built, houses just barely built, houses that are just foundations, literally any part of the building process is fascinating to me. Not to Jon, but to me. He’s been willing to go through a bunch of floorplans so he doesn’t get stuck with whatever I choose.

We’ve looked through dozens of houses and maybe more floorplans. I’m excited by this process, but Jon wears down. I realized he was probably done (forever) when I came around a corner and he was sitting on the stairs, with his head in his hands, just looking exhausted and saying something about why this house might have a 1% advantage over the last five houses, or maybe not.

We finally decided on the builder Flagship Homes for their reputation and their floorplans. Other builders, like Fieldstone, had (in our opinion) poorly planned layouts that felt really claustrophobic and weird in places. Flagship was, coincidentally, the first builder we looked at. They had model homes out in Vineyard, UT, but we wound up settling on the Silverlake division in Eagle Mountain. Not the remote Eagle Mountain, which is like 30 minutes from the freeway and literally in the middle of nowhere. We chose a lot right on the edge of where Eagle Mountain meets Saratoga Springs. The lots we wanted were right next to a huge field owned by the LDS Church. It’s a freaking amazing view.

The idea of moving is scary and stressful for both of us, and we’ve heard stories about what a nightmare the process is for building, but I’m enthusiastic and hopeful that this will work out well for us. We’ve decided to go ahead and sell Jon’s house now so that we can get it out of the way, and have some of the fees to begin building.