A Year to Remember...

I should start by saying that I have been meaning to start blogging for WAY too long now. My initial thought was I will blog about the wedding planning process and then buying our first home. Obviously, neither of these happened since we are 4 months into our marriage and already living in our first home. So.. as many say better late then never! I will start by giving a brief recap of both of these life changing events. Here we go with the blogging...

What a year is has been for the NEW Johnson Family! It all started long before a year ago when we met through a mutual friend and soon after started on a journey that would forever change our lives. My firefighter asked me to marry him on July 31, 2010... Of course my answer was YES!!! We had been dating for 16 months at the time we were engaged. Being the typical hopelessly romantic girl, I was completely sucked into the wedding planning process. I think almost immediately the whole bride thing got the best of me... The dreams of the picture perfect wedding could now become a reality.  At one point in my life my dream job was to be a WEDDING PLANNER. As you could imagine planning my own wedding was the perfect side job for me.  I LOVED every process of the wedding planning (expect of course the waiting for the actual day to come).

In addition to planning our wedding, my firefighter and I thought why not try and buy our first home  at the same time? Being that my soon to be hubby was still living with his parents and I had recently moved back home to save money for the BIG day... We had to decide where we would be starting our lives as soon as we said the I Do's. We both came to the agreement that we did not want to waste any money on renting an apartment. This meant that we had to get on top of looking for a house. As you might have heard with the low interest rates and the even lower real estate prices we figured this was the perfect time to live "The America Dream" of owning our very own home. We started this process right around the holidays... With many heartaches and frustrations we had issue after issue with finding the PERFECT home. By "perfect" I mean the right price, location and being able to close in the right time frame. It seemed as we had every odd against us.. How could we really pull all of this off before the BIG day that was quickly approaching?! I kept telling myself, "God has a plan for us and if we are meant to own a home we will." Well, that was in fact true... We had found the PERFECT house months prior and we unfortunately a few days too late. The house had just opened escrow. BUMMER! Our agent decided that why not just put a backup offer in?! What will it hurt? With every other house we saw... We kept thinking of the house we called Purisima (because this was the street it was located on). I think just about when we had given up hope (I think which was about early to mid March). We were at dinner with our other love, our iPhone's, which I often wonder how on earth did I EVER live without an iPhone (sad I know). My firefighter looking once again at the updated MLS listings when blurted out... "Purisima is back on MLS!!!!!!!" What? How can this be? They were in escrow and we had a backup offer in. This triggered me to quickly dial our real estate agents number...

We patiently waited roughly 12 hours hear that yes in fact they had fallen out of escrow and they were accepting our backup offer. Our prayers had been answered. God did have it in his plans for us to live on our beloved Purisima house. Being that we were only like 45 days away from the wedding we were thrilled. Everything went as planned... We closed escrow on April 13, 2011. Exactly 10 days before were to be husband and wife. My firefighter was a little bummed that this only gave him 10 days to be a bachelor, as he was moving in before the wedding and I would move in after.  My firefighter quickly moved into what was our 1st home. Without me moving in yet we still managed to disagree how certain things should be... Like the infamous TRASH CAN disagreement (I will leave this for another post).

                            

 Either way we were SO excited to have one of the big hurdles out of the way... Now onto the last minute wedding details. I thought I had myself quite organized and put together. Boy was I wrong. It seemed like everything needed to be done in 2 days, while I was still working a full-time job. Fortunately, everything came together beautifully. We had an amazing wedding day. We were so thankful for our families (especially my mom) who made it all possible. It was everything we dreamed of and more. I found myself wanting the night to NEVER end. How can this day be over so quickly when I spent month and months planning?! Luckily we will forever have the beautiful pictures and memories to remind us of how we started our lives as husband and wife.

I have to say that it was quite the journey to finding the man of my dreams. It involved a lot of heartache and questions... Again, we have to remember that God has a plan for us and even though we never know what the plan is, we know that he knows best. He knew that all of those sleepless nights would be worth it in the long run. I am so thankful to have such an amazing man and companion in my life.  I cannot wait to see what else God has in store for us... It is a beautiful life and I am so grateful for all of our blessings!