What owning our first home taught me

If you follow me on my instagram @chiccaroline, my life seems pretty perfect from the outside. Playing dress up, taking chic photos, traveling around world, loving my job and living in a stylish home. 

I, just like the vast majority of the instagramer, am sharing a picture of what “a perfect” life should look like.  The social media platform becomes a tool I use to filter out the challenge I faced and the unhappy moments in my life.  But hey,  those are my personal issues which the outside world does not need to know. 

I started my blog back in 2014 as purely a hobby.  Like all the bloggers out there, I dreamed about getting sponsorship from brands and getting free stays at hotels around the world.  It kinda took off when I lived in NYC and then it died when the market got saturated with everyone getting into blogging, and I moved to Seattle for a job with Amazon.
 
Unlike most of the bloggers, I have a great full time job and I love what I do. I am not in the game to make a living off being a blogger.   Blogging is purely something I do for fun, a media platform for me to share my passion about photographing and styling.  I could say maybe that’s why I never made it in the blogger business because I was never serious enough.

Don’t give me wrong, I cared about gaining followers just like other bloggers. I googled many times on how to booster instagram followers while waiting for NYC subways.  That was me, in my 20’s, living in the bubble fantasy world.   I used to religiously ask my husband to take photos for me every weekend.  At first he hated doing it as he does not understand why.  Looking back I put him through a lot.  He did get good at it though (under my training :)). 

So what does all I have said so far have to do with owning a home?  
Owing a home comes with responsibility.  We, as a first time home buyer, as a couple, learned it in a hard way.  We rushed into our decision making and bought our place when the market was at peak.  Not only that, we had to deal with the builder and developers who lacked integrity when we went through serious construction deficits.  We spent our first year fixing our supposed to be “brand new” home.  We were living in a construction zone for more than 8 months and we fought pretty much every single day.  It was hard. Our relationship was on edge. How did we get through it? I don’t know. Looking back I think we just dealt with it and made it work.  We made our relationship work because we really wanted it to.  Both of us grew so much in the past two years and we learned so much about each other.

Despite how resentful we felt towards our home during the construction, we invested so much love and energy to it, we invested into each other.  

So coming back to the blogger topic,  I want to share my home ownership experience,  because the story behind putting this stylish home together is not easy.  It’s authentic and it’s real.  It finally felt home and we are truly grateful and loving this space.