from the desk of Maggie

We Bought a House!!

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Southern wedding photographer for the fleeting moments that make life worth living. This blog is the home for some of my favorite things — from weddings, engagement sessions & more personal things. 

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That’s right folks, the Amayas are officially homeowners! But here’s the big kicker…we’re moving back to Winston-Salem!! Technically the house is in Clemmons but we’ll be back in the triad at the end of June!

Believe it or not, this has been over a year in the making. We were sitting at our favorite sushi restaurant last Spring after having been going back and forth to Winston a ton for family. See, we had just lost two important people to our family: my aunt Kristi and my youth leader Shasta. We lost them within 10 days of one another to cancer and it was an awful time. We were traveling back and forth to Winston and it became clear that our family and support system was there. So there we were, eating sushi and re-evaluating our whole life plan. We were preparing to get married that fall and it suddenly became harder and harder to imagine raising kids over an hour from our families. Not to mention that David has been commuting every day to High Point from Charlotte since August of 2017 (he was going to find something in CLT but had been too busy to look!) We weighed the pros and cons, but the answer seemed pretty obvious: nothing was left for us here and our future was waiting in the triad. We knew we needed to wait until after we got married because we had just renewed our lease on our rental home, and we couldn’t buy a house, move cities and get married in three months! So we decided that summer 2019 would be the summer we officially moved back to Winston and bought our first home!

Fast-forward to April 2019. After searching obsessively for houses on every single site possible for MONTHS, we were finally ready to get started! While I was ready to hit the ground running, it also coincided with David’s busiest travel season to date. So that meant I did lots of meetings alone and filled him in on the progress. We expected to start the pre-approval process in April, search for a home in May and be under contract in June for a July move in. What we did not anticipate however was to fall in love (and BUY!) the very first house that I saw with our realtor. I had shown it to her at our first meeting just because I was interested but didn’t think it’d be on the market for much longer. Well…a week later we went to the house and I sent videos to David as I walked through the house. The real kicker was that the house was USDA eligible (basically the government is giving folks incentives to move farther from the city in exchange for no down payment and lower closing costs) and it automatically saved us $10,000!! That was a huge incentive because we’re first time homebuyers and newlyweds, and just don’t have $20,000 cash for a house! By the grace of God, the house stayed available long enough for David to come back home for 48 HOURS!! In those two days, we saw the house, put an offer on the house, increased our offer to compete with a second one, and after the longest 12 hours of my life…they accepted our offer and we were under contract!!

Honestly, you might be thinking that we’re a little crazy for buying the first home that we saw. It’s like wedding dress right?! While yes it is a little crazy, it’s also very true to character. You see, I found my love for photography when I was 13 and decided then that I wanted to be a photographer. I applied to one university and got in! I married the boy that I started to date when I was 16. And yes, I bought the second wedding dress I tried on. And along this whole house buying process, I prayed that the Lord prepare the way for us. I didn’t want it to be hard and for me to force it, because I can be pretty stubborn! And it was miraculous just how easy this process has been!! Even David’s crazy traveling in the Spring and me shooting weddings every weekend. All of that needed to happen to allow us to financially make all of this happen! He paved the way, showing us that this indeed was the house for our next chapter.

So, what does this mean for my business and my Charlotte brides? To sum it up…nothing!! This changes absolutely nothing about my connection to my Charlotte brides and the wedding industry here! It simply expands my market and makes me a bit more central to Raleigh, Boone, and of course Winston-Salem! By going full time this year, that gives me the flexibility to come down to Charlotte for shoots and meetings during the week, as well as weddings on the weekends!

Ultimately we will miss this sweet city and it will always be where we moved in together, where we got our #sweetpupleia, got engaged, planned a wedding, and spent the first eight months of marriage. We will miss the endless new restaurants and breweries, my photo friends who’s friendship survives distance, and ending date nights with Amelie’s, it’s time for a new season as our time in the Queen City comes to an end!

Special thanks to Maggie Bohannon at Lime Rock Realty for walking us through this process and doing the sweetest little home photo shoot with us!!

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