The secret’s out…we bought a piece of land!

It feels surreal to even be typing this because even though we’ve been dreaming about this for some time now, it all happened very fast and we’re still processing it honestly. But first, let’s rewind, because I realize this might seem totally out of the blue for those who haven’t heard me talk about wanting to move. Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?

If you didn’t know, Wes and I both grew up in the small coastal town of Gig Harbor (for him, his entire life, for me, since I was 11). While it’s a charming town with a lot to offer, neither of us ever had any intention of moving back there. When we bought our house in West Seattle almost 11 years ago now, we knew nothing about West Seattle except for Alki Beach (which I had been to only once before I was sold on it), but quickly grew to love the area. Our house is walking distance to “The Junction” with a ton of bars and restaurants, a 2 minute drive to the nearest grocery store or pharmacy and most importantly, a bike ride away from one of the only sandy beaches in all of Seattle, Alki Beach. We are even right across the street from one of the best elementary schools (we didn’t even realize that since we bought before we had kids). Hell, we even remodeled our quaint 1940’s craftsman and turned it into the modern farmhouse of dreams. West Seattle was where we thought we would live “forever”. But as the years went on, we grew not only as people, but as a family as well. Two kids, a remodel and a change of career later (for me anyway), our priorities changed. It wasn’t really until the pandemic that we realized how much we misssed being close to family a friends. Both our families still live in Gig Harbor (well just my Mom, but Wes’ Dad and entire extended family is there, which includes a slew of little cousins just waiting to play with our girls) and most of our friends moved back shortly after college. Throw in a bunch of political nonesense, excess crime and overall growth that comes with any big city and we started to realize we were no longer “city people”. So we started to explore the idea of moving back home.

Back in 2021, we heard about an off-market property in our dream neighborhood and I absolutely fell in love. It was a large lot (a little over an acre) and had the most beautiufl view of the puget sound. I was sold. The only problem? The Gig Harbor real estate market absolutely blew up during the pandemic when everyone caught on to how small, charming and affordable it was and realized they no longer had to commute into the office. The land was simply more than we were willing to spend and the seller wasn’t willing to negotiate. I was crushed, not only because it was a dream of a property but because I had already spent hours pinning my “future dream home” and imagining our lives there. That’s the hard thing about change, you really have to put yourself out there and visualize your life in the future, but also risk the chance of getting hurt in the process. After that deal fell through, I wrote off the idea of moving as it clearly wasn’t meant to be. So we did some projects in our current house like our mini basement renovation (I still owe you a blog post on that project) and bought some new furniture for the living room in an effort to make the house feel like our forever home. But if I’m being completely honest, I always knew (even we remodeled) that we would not be here forever. For some reason, I just couldn’t picture us living there past the kids being in elementary school and I guess my intuition was right, because we we’re building a new house!

So what spurred this sudden change of heart?

Back in December, Wes’ Aunt hosted all the cousins over to her house for a cookie decorating party (something we had done before but it had been a few years). She had little aprons for all the kids and fun activities to play and as I drove away from her gorgeous home and neighborhood (which is actually only 5 minutes away from our new property), I couldn’t ignore something pulling on my heart strings. Something inside me was telling me this was the next chapter of our life and it was in that moment that I told Wes, “we need to move back to Gig Harbor”. You can imagine his surprise as I had made it very clear I wasn’t moving again after that land deal fell through 2 years before, but he agreed that it was important to give our girls the gift of family. A gift that so many don’t have the opportunity to receive. We both grew up with a lot of cousins and family around and it was important to us that our girls had the same memories. So, the search for our “unicorn” home or property began. We enlisted the help of a real estate agent that was referred to us by a good friend and started hitting the pavement. From our first phone call with Marisa (our agent), we made it very clear we had a laundry list of must-haves that we realized would be extremely hard to find, but deep down, I knew we would find it. I started to manifest our dream home and property. What life would be like there, what our home would look like, how our kids would play outside, etc. It seems crazy I know, but I have known what this house has looked like for a few years now ever since I got a taste of what it might be like to build. And being that I design houses for a living, building a home has always been a dream of mine. The only problem? The housing and vacant land inventory in Gig Harbor was LOW. To give you context, we started look back in January of this year and we only saw maybe two houses in person. Nothing seemed to fit the bill of needing privacy, a larger lot and a home that was either able to be renovated or simply needed some cosmetic updates. We knew this was something we were likely going to need to take into our own hands if we wanted it to happen anytime soon and then one day, something pretty miraculous happened.

We drove out to Gig Harbor on a rainy, gloomy Saturday with the girls and started exploring neighborhoods we’d never seen or been to before (Wes is a google maps pro and can find his way around anything). We came across this dream of a neighborhood with acres of sprawling horse pastures and beautiful brand new custom homes. We thought to ourselves “What is this place?”. After talking to our agent and doing some of our own research, Wes found out that the land in the neighborhood was all bought up back in 2019 and homes were built by a custom builder all expected to now be worth around $2M+. Umm excuse me!? It was in that moment, we both realized we might have missed the boat in moving back to the hometown we once couldn’t wait to leave. But here’s the thing about my husband, he really doesn’t like to be told No. And even though no one actually told us no, it was as if the universe was trying to tell us something, and not in a good way. Moving suddenly felt unattainable but we weren’t willing to take no for an answer. It was that night that Wes spent hours scouring Google Maps in all the areas we loved and even though he’d seen this one particular property before, this time it stuck out to him for some reason. He always thought the property had a house on it so he’d never given it much thought, but as he zoomed in, he realized it was actually a barn. So he took the address of the house next door and popped it into the Pierce County Assessors’ site and realized that the home and the lot next door had just gone into a trust. He found out who the executor was and sent him an email asking if they had plans to sell. That next day, he found 15 other properties and mailed out and emailed love letters to each of them. Explaining to all that we were a family of four who was looking to move our two girls back to our hometown of Gig Harbor. To our surprise, we actually got an email back (and a few “WE’RE NOT INTERESTED IN SELLING” notes along the way').

We heard back from the Son of the family that owned the property with the barn and he let us know it was eventually going to be sold, but that the home next to it was for sale (off-market) so he offered for us to drive out there and take a look. I was gone in Palm Springs, but Wes took Tayler out there to see it. The house and lot was beautiful with a charming pond in the front in which she asked “Daddy, does the house come with the ducks?” —can you even!? He sent me pictures while I was away and I was immediatley excited about the possiblity. So I asked him to find out if we could go inside the house to see what type of work it needed as he mentioned it would need to be renovated. Turns out, by the time we heard back from him the house had already sold (he was already talking to another family before we emailed him). I hoped this wouldn’t be another let down like before, but he was adamant that the barn lot would be for sale soon…the only caveat? He was going to list it on the open market and wouldn’t be able to accept our offer until it was officially listed. This was defeating as we knew land in that area was extremely hard to come by (almost once in a lifetime if you will) and we assumed there would be a lot of interest and most likely multiple offers. It took a couple months before he actually listed it but he promised he would keep us updated when the sale was was live so we could put in an offer. Luckily, since we already had an agent and knew the price, we were ready to make an offer as soon as it went live (whenever that was). As you can imagine, this was the longest couple months ever. I felt so stuck not knowing what our next steps were or if we should move on from this pipe dream in the off change he changed his mind. So one Sunday, while I was doing my weekly sauna session, I asked the universe for a sign. To my surprise the land went live just two days later. We made an offer, and he accepted it almost immediately. I still look back at this journey with tears in my eyes as I can’t think of a more serendipitous situation.

But wait, there’s more…

Buying land is actually a fairly straight forward process. You purchase the land and then you have a 15-30 day feasability where a series of tests and research is done to confirm the land is up to your building standards. We got so lucky because our wonderful agent referred us to someone who actually specializes in land feasibility and building permits. Had we not had her, we likely wouldn’t have been able to secure this deal because there was so much to do before the feasibility period was over (per our contract, ours was only 20 days). The great thing about the feasibility clause is that should you come across any information that may hinder the home you want to build, you can back out of the deal no questions asked. That gave a lot of peace of mind because the last thing you want is to purchase land and later realize it needs a ton of work to even develop the site prior to building. While the feasibility studies were being done, I went to work putting together a spreadsheet to figure out what it would cost to build and develop the site. You have to take into account things like, wetland assessments fees, civil engineers, utility hook ups, septic and so much more. And that’s all before you can even factor in the cost per square foot to build. But to our surprise, the land was very build ready and only a small amount of tests would be needed once the deal closed.

Our amazing builder at Remodel Pros NW who did our remodel and has worked on several projects for our clients at Styled Out West offered to build for us Buidling a home is a full time job in and of itself but finding a builder you can rely on can be half the battle. With all of those things lined up, we also took those 20 days to think long and hard about this decision. Of course, I was all in from day one — something in me just felt this was 100% the right decision for us. It was hard to ignore all the positive signs (there’s so much more I haven’t even gotten into but lets just say when something is meant for you, it will hit you smack dab in the face so you have no choice but to accept it). But Wes, being the realist he is (not everyone can be the dreamer unfortunately), was stressed to the max about this decision. The decision to move was a given, but the decision to build a house was an entirely other beast. It’s a lot of financial responsibly — so much can go wrong and there are a lot of unknowns. But ultimately, after all my research, budget crunching and listening to my heart, we decided to move forward and we officially closed last week! We still have a very long road ahead — at best, the house will be done at the end of 2025, but all of that is still unknown at this point as we haven’t gotten past the initial shock that this is all really happening.

So what’s next?

We have a lot to do and figure out in the coming months, but I will share everything I can with you throughout the process, mostly on my personal Instagram, but also here on the blog. It will be like 2018 all over again when I journaled about our home renovation from start to finish! It will be so fun to look back on this journey with the girls someday and see how the entire process unfolded.

And because I know what you’re all thinking…Yes! We do plan to sell our house (if you’re interested, send me an email to jenna@styledoutwest.com), it’s just a matter of when. We originally thought we might sell ASAP and rent something down there to get the girls settled into their new schools. And while I still am leaning towards this idea, timing is telling us otherwise. Moving now would mean we’d have to rent for 18+ months and the cost of rent is more expensive than our current mortgage. Not to mention, school is less than 5 weeks away and I’m just not sure we can pull it all off in that short amount of time without giving Wes a heart attack. So, for now, I think we will stay put in West Seattle and will put the house on the market next Spring/Early Summer. By then, we will have already started building and will have a good idea of when it will be complete and can go from there. Like, I said, this all still doesn’t feel real and I think once we have a few more things ironed out, we can officially celebrate. Until then, life still feels a bit all over the place.

Our next steps is to get a few of the tests that are required for permitting done in the next 2 months and start designing the house! I of course, already have a Pinterest board started (it’s been 3 years in the making — you can view it here) and have sketched out our ideal floor plan. Now we will work on getting those plans drawn up and fit into the footprint we are allowed within our lot.

We’ve been out to the property a dozen times now and have met both sets of neighbors (there are only 3 houses on our entire street which I love) and every-time we’ve been there, we’ve seen a family of deer — you can imagine how excited the girls were the first time they saw that. Whenever we are there, we feel at peace — the birds are chirping, you can’t hear the road noise and it just feels like home. It’s hard to imagine a life on 1.5 acres being that we barely have a back yard now, but I am so excited to watch the girls play outside and eventually have a garden — did I mention we have fruit trees!? I’m so excited. At the end of the day, we finally found our unicorn property and it’s pretty amazing how it all came together.

MORE TO COME…STAY TUNED!