Today, I'm sharing a little bit about our journey of buying our first home.
My husband and I were both raised in small towns in Southern California. When you grow up in a small town, it seems like all you want to do is find your way to something "bigger" and "better". Well, I did just that when I went to college in Los Angeles. I ended up living there for 7 years and am really glad I did, but eventually realized I had hit my LA limit and needed a change.
So off to San Diego I went. Now, I grew-up not far from San Diego and have always loved the city. To me San Diego has a small town feel, with big city amenities and amazing weather. My husband and I wanted to live in San Diego so bad that he was commuting 120+ miles a day after we got married so we could live there.
We found out quickly that the crazy commuting wasn't for us, so we went to plan B. As I've mentioned before, my husband is a teacher. If you know anything about the education system in California, you know how difficult it can be to get (and keep) a job due to all the budget problems here. Since my husband was a relatively new teacher, we decided it was best for us to move to where his job was (and also his hometown) in Beaumont, California.
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Beaumont is where we ended up buying a house. I had visited Beaumont a lot when I was dating my husband and always felt so comfortable there. It reminded me of my hometown of Temecula, California when I was growing up - great weather, nice people, central location, great school district, newer houses and best of all not lots of traffic. After living in LA, I really grew to appreciate not having to sit in traffic just to travel a few miles.
If you're familiar with Southern California, you may have driven through Beaumont on your way out to Palm Springs. It's at the intersection of where the 10 and 60 freeways meet. Although, it may seem a ways out there to some people, I've found it's in a great location:
Cabazon Outlets - 15 minutes away (think Tory Burch, Neiman Marcus, Ugg, Under Armour, and sooo many more!)
Palm Springs - 30 minutes away
Temecula - 45 minutes away
Big Bear - 1 hour away
Orange County - 1 hour away
Los Angeles - 1 1/2 to 2 hours away
San Diego - 1 1/2 to 2 hours away
Santa Barbara - 2 1/2 hours away
Las Vegas - 3 1/2 hours away
During the housing boom, Beaumont was one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Shopping centers were constructed and more restaurants opened.
As you can guess though, the economic downturn did hit the city's housing market pretty hard. But we were one of the lucky ones that were able to get into a house after things seemed to bottom out.
We looked at a lot of houses and made quite a few offers. Although there were a lot of houses vacant at the time, there was still a lot of competition out there. Our Realtor was so great at walking us through the entire process and advising us on tricky issues. We were fortunate to have an offer accepted and most importantly closed escrow on our favorite house.
There are still a lot of things we want to do to our home. (You can see some of the goals I have for the house this year in this post.) But we absolutely love our house and the neighborhood we live in. We love taking walk around this lake which is just steps from our front door.
We're not sure what the future holds, but right now we are loving our "new" house and would be very happy here for years to come :)
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