Maybe you’ve closed on a house before. We sure hadn’t, and it was hard to know what to expect. I can assure you that you’ve almost certainly not been to a closing like this one!

First of all, it was queer as the day is long, folks! There was only one name on the deed, so we didn’t know until closing that we were buying the house from husbands. HUSBANDS! I almost squealed with delight, and between our talks and pictures of our gorgeous realtor (and her wife’s) gorgeous twin babies, it was just about the gayest (happy) and gayest (gay) day ever!

Here’s footage of the meeting:

Our realtor brought us sweet, crazy unicorn keychains and paper straws and balloons, and our mortgage officer brought us a Georgia-shaped cutting board. It was such a sweet celebration. We actually had to sign documents labeling us as wife and husband, because the world is still quite a hetero-normative place, y’all, but we all laughed about it and got on with the joy.

It takes a village of loving, caring, intelligent people to help a first-time home buyer feel ready, and it’s hard to put into words how grateful we are for our tribe of powerful women who helped us through this process. We had a sweet little photo shoot afterwards when the previous owners handed us the keys. I’ve cropped them out of this photo because I didn’t tell them I’d be posting it anywhere, but please try to imagine them as a sweet, loving couple — also newlyweds — who were like a foot and a half taller than us! How they lived in our tiny house, I will never know.

Everyone keeps asking if it was exhilarating to enter our home again afterwards. It actually wasn’t. It didn’t feel as though it belonged to us; it honestly felt like we had made a questionable rental decision!

We bought our house before it went on the market, so it hadn’t been cleaned up, painted, etc. for sale. After the closing, we felt more like we were walking into someone else’s home, because now we had met them.

But we also made ourselves celebrate, and that’s what we needed. Prosecco, plastic cups, Thai food delivery, and a blow up mattress. Our little slice of weird, slightly awkward heaven.

And because we’re so excited about the work we’ll be talking about on this blog…

Within 90 minutes of having the keys, we were ripping up carpet in the living room to get a look at the sub-floor. Indigo was doing snow-angels in the old carpet mess, because now that it’s ours, the great de-biege-ification can begin. LET’S DO THIS.