After an epic experience in Europe, it was time to take on a new adventure back in Washington, DC. We made a decision to go back to our home base and regroup. Now a family of three, we had to figure out a few logistical things, like place to live, ways to get around town, and ways to make a living.
Fortunately, I had an interview lined up literally one day after we got back from Sweden in the summer of 2013. My sister was awesome enough to let us stay in her one bedroom condo and drive her Toyota Matrix for as long as we needed to. Sister we love you and can’t tell you how much we appreciate your kindness. In the mean time, we started looking for our new place. I leveraged pubic transportation 99.99% of the time commuting to and from work, we walked to the grocery store, and buying a car was not as urgent as we though it would be.
Finding Our New Home
Deciding where to buy was a challenge. However, after a short while and a few excel sheets later, we bought 1,200 square foot, 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom apartment with patio, in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We contacted our real estate agent, Dana Scanlon, and she took care of the rest.
Our decision was to avoid PMI, so we ended up putting 20% down of $280,000 and financed the remaining $224,000 over 30 years at 4%. Not ideal given our circumstances, and the fact that we lived over seas for an extended period of time. You may ask, what does that have to do with anything? Well, we have not been employed for over 2 years, have not payed taxes for over 2 years, and we have not had any credit history for over 2 years. From a lender standpoint, we weren’t qualified candidates. After some back and fort with the bank, we struck a deal and settled for 4% interest rate.
Two short weeks after closing on our apartment, Leslie, very unexpectedly, found out she was having twins!!! It was such an epic surprise that we couldn’t believe the news. It was a pretty big deal for us because neither of us has twins in our family.
With all that said, we outgrew our apartment two weeks in and we had to figure out a way to make our new home cozy and comfortable for all five of us, at least while the babies were little. We made few lifestyle changes and became minimalists with all of our belongings from clothes, to toys, to furniture. We lived by the motto “pay twice as much buy half as many”. Surprisingly enough, it has worked well for us as we are still living in the same place five years later. It is amazing what you can do once you start thinking creatively.
It did not take us long to start adding our personal touch to our new place. Leslie and I painted the entire apartment, we bought all of our supplies at Lowes, through Ebates, which ended up saving us 15% of the total cost. We hired a contractor to rip up the carpet and refinish the hardwood floors.
Next project on the list was to gut the kitchen. We took it to the studs. We chose IKEA because of style, practicality, and cost. Our IKEA kitchen looks so good that our neighbor next door remodeled his kitchen like ours. The entire project took a couple of weeks and roughly $17,000 including material and labor.
The last project on the list was our bathroom. Once again we chose IKEA and Lowes to buy all the materials and we hired a contractor to do all the work for us. I posted an ad on Angie’s List and had contractors bid for the job. We kept it simple and did not do any plumbing or electrical work; we even kept the same cast-iron bathtub because it was in a great shape.
The project took about three weeks because there were too many moving parts and a lot of paperwork had to be submitted with the building management prior to any work being done in the unit. The total cost for the bathroom remodel ended up being $5,500.
In the years to come, we plan to remodel the kids’ bathroom, replace all the interior doors, and reorganize the kids’ room. Our plan is to go with either triple bunk beds or a twin over full bunk bed.
Car Shopping
Even though we had my sister’s car and our place was on top of the metro, we had to shop for a bigger car. Since 2005, Leslie and I have always shared one car. The public transportation in DC is great and convenient; therefore we have always relied on the metro or bus to get around town. Often times we walked to the grocery store and even to work.
Now that our family was growing, we were looking into buying a SUV. Since this would be the only vehicle we were going to own, we did not want to buy a mini-van, and couldn’t fit in a sedan comfortably with all the car seats. Before we left for Europe, we sold our Honda Accord to Carmax for a decent price considering the miles and the year. We walked away with $5,000. Based on our prior experience, we decided to use Carmax once again. After months of research we found a used 2006 Lexus GX470 with 70,000 miles on it for $23,000. Since we had a mortgage, we did not want to finance the car and decided to pay for it in full.
Work To Live
Being able to find work right after we got back from Europe made life a bit easier in terms of settling down. At least for the time being. I was working full time and commuting to work Monday to Friday. It didn’t take much to get back into the groove of things because I had a great leader and an awesome team. Plus I loved what I was going as a Network Systems Engineer, that worked felt more like a hobby than just another job.
Going to work was like going to my lab where I was able to experiment and discover new things. After all, I was looking to make a difference and wanted to be a revenue rather than expense for the project for which I was working. I worked tirelessly and always tried to make things better, more efficient, and cost effective, in all aspects of the business lifecycle.
Success followed shortly after. The fruits of my labor paid off year after year. Despite all of the success at work, we keep living a minimalist lifestyle and I kept building my relationship with my superiors and equals day in and day out. We have achieved such a tremendous success over the years which is a result of hard work, dedication, and perseverance.
It is a true pleasure to a be part of such first class performers. A little sense of humor and laughter here and there, helped me deal with the ups and downs of the day.
Daily Life
In order to become more engaged with our community, we joined our church, McLean Presbyterian, volunteered, and became physically active. Leslie signed up for MOPS, which is a program at church for moms of pre schoolers, and I went back to volunteering for IEEE, which is the world’s largest not-for-profit organization that advances technology for the benefit of humanity. We went to the gym couple of times a week and I started playing soccer on the weekends with my old pals. Occasionally, we took trips with the kids to see family and friends over the holidays.
We travel as often as we could, attended local festivals and fairs and hosted fair amount of lunch and dinner parties. We met new friends and neighbors as we were slowly settling in.
Final Thoughts
It has been an epic and eventful journey getting back into the DC groove. We made pretty important choices in our personal and professional lives that yielded excellent results. After all, we were happy to reconnect with old friends and colleague and start a new life with our babies. It felt good to be back on our home turf again.
