We’re Moving!

May 18, 2020

Surprise! If you missed it the other day, we’re MOVING (and spoiler alert, as of Saturday, we bought a house – I’m sharing one photo below)! Andrew and I are feeling very, very bittersweet about the whole thing. This isn’t how we pictured we would leave Chicago…not being able to enjoy the city one last time makes me feel really sad. But, nevertheless, its our time, so let’s take a quick trip down memory lane, and I’ve linked all of our home project in one place for you to reference later! – lauren

Then & Now

We bought our Chicago condo three years ago in June of 2017 (check out first-time homebuyer tips here). The funny thing is, we always said we would live here for three years and then move on, crazy that actually worked out somehow? The photo on the left is the day we got our keys and the one on the right is our last meal as a family. My oh my, how much more tired I look on the right….it’s okay, it’s okay, I accept this phase of life. Plus, how cute is O? 🙂

I could type pages and pages all of the memories we’ve had here, but then I’d be still sitting here hours later, with an empty bottle of wine, crying my eyes out, so I won’t do that. Ha! But I will say, one of my favorite memories to this day was Andrew’s 30th birthday party. We had just bought our condo and all our friends came over, I surprised him and rented a trolley for the night to cruise the town. I even had Coors Light cookies made for him. Such carefree times!!

Some of you may be wondering why we are moving, especially since my work is about a five minute commute from our condo. We only have a 2 bed, 2 bath and we were slowly outgrowing it once Olive arrived. And as much as Andrew and I love and adore the city, raising a family here isn’t sustainable for us. I will miss our friends and our nanny so much, saying goodbye to them definitely made it extra hard, but I made Andrew promise me he’ll take me back for dinner + night out w/ friends on a semi-regular basis. After all, we met here and it will always be sweet, home Chicago to us.

Chicago Home Projects

To make it easy, I thought I would re-link all of the projects we tackled while we lived in Chicago. Feel free to leave a comment below if you ever have a question about anything!

Selling & Buying

Before Covid-19, our plan was to list in March. Once Covid hit in mid-March, we delayed putting our place on the market for obvious reasons. Fast forward a month later and we felt like the shock of the virus had settled, so, we decided to list and see what happened! After all, we had been living in DeKalb with my parents anyways, so not being in Chicago made it extra easy for showings. I was shocked, but we sold our condo in 6 days!! Holy crap you guys, it happened so fast, we had 14 showings in 6 days and then it was sold! In a weird way, we felt like Covid worked in our favor because there wasn’t much on the market.

Since we sold our place a few weeks ago, we’ve been living with Andrew’s parents in Naperville full-time where we have a nice basement all to ourselves (I can’t wait to show you the new digs – ha!). It’s been nice being here because we’ve had to go back to the city so many times to pack and get ready for the move. All our stuff will go into storage for a few months until we officially move into the new place. We’re so lucky to have parents to take care of us while we go through this major life change.

So…onto the BIG news. We bought a house!! We’ve been looking at houses since October of last year (our realtor is exhausted), so you could say that Andrew and I know exactly what we are looking for at this point, we just had to find it. We looked at houses that were fully finished to foreclosures that were literally falling apart. We also looked in a bunch of different Western suburbs, but focused on Lisle, Naperville, Batavia and St. Charles. After lots of conversations, we decided instead of picking a town, we’d let the house pick for us.

Our New, Home Sweet Home

I’m so excited to say, we bought a house in Batavia!! In a matter of two days, we became home owners again (this stuff happens so quickly!). We officially get the keys July 4th weekend, but we won’t be moving in for a little while after that because of all the big projects that have to be done first. I promise to take you along every step of the way, I have high expectations for the before and after photos that will come your way.

Some of you may be wondering, what about work? One day, I will have to go back into my office downtown, but because of the circumstances, I don’t know when that will be. It may not even be until next year, the future is just so unknown right now, so until then, I’m enjoying my 1 minute commute from my bedroom to my dining room table (“the office”).