Wedding Photography : Mistakes Make Magic

185: We sold our dream house..here's why.

• Catherine Guidry: Wedding Photographer + Educator

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After six years of renovating and living in our 140-year-old New Orleans double, we made the difficult decision to sell our "forever home"." It was a heart wrenching but strategic decision that might surprise you on the why!

Would you make the same choice?

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Speaker 1:

Hello and thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Katherine Guidry. I am a full-time wedding photographer based in the New Orleans area, and I'm just coming here today to chat with you about life. A lot of what I talk about on this channel is wedding photography and business, but today's episode is actually quite personal and if you've been following my journey for a little bit, you might have seen that we sold our house, which is a huge deal. I'll dive more into that in a minute, but thank you for being here and I'm really excited for this more personal episode today. If you're somebody who is a wedding photographer and maybe you're interested in up-leveling the business side or the posing side of your business, be sure to check out our free classes. They've just been released and I'm so excited about them. So look at those links in the description and I hope you can sign up. So, like I said, if you've been following our journey for some time now, then, who knows? You may have seen when we bought our home in 2018 in New Orleans.

Speaker 1:

It was a total mess, to say the least. The home is around 140 years old and we were 100% sold on the location Brad and I always wanted to live in the city, like in the heart of the city, and we knew it would be close to work, with so many of our weddings being in that area of uptown, in the French quarter of New Orleans. And you know, this house came up for sale. We had been looking for almost three years and I'm not joking when I say I walked through the house and within like less than 10 minutes I knew that we were going to make an offer on this house. It was like in total disrepair. It was actually a double, which is a historic new orleans architectural type where it's essentially two houses that are connected by a wall. And I tell you this because I want you to know that we weren't just renovating one house, we were going to be renovating two houses. I've always been a bit of an overachiever, so why not?

Speaker 1:

When brad and I bought the house, we really didn't know what we were stepping into. Honestly, we could never have guessed the amount of time, effort, money, stress that we were stepping into. If you don't know, brad and I actually my husband I keep saying Brad as if you do know, but if you don't, brad's my husband. He's also my second shooter in the business, and when we decided to buy this house, we realized that we both had masters in architecture, but we had never renovated our personal home Before then. We had lived in a new home, and so this was just like a totally new adventure. And boy, did we not expect to dive into what we did. Did we not expect to dive into what we did? So it's been a very long journey.

Speaker 1:

Six years later, we've had two kids, we've built businesses deeper into the city, we've met so many friends and just like, really built a life in this house, and so it was really bittersweet when we decided to sell it. I truly thought that this was going to be our forever home and so, like personal lesson learned, even if you think somewhere is your forever home, I even said I was like this is going to be our forever home, unless something unforeseen happened, and so, like, the point is that we think that something's forever and maybe it's not, and that's okay. So why did we sell this house? Like I said, it's like if anyone knows us and maybe you're hearing this for the first time, you're probably a little surprised, because it's so much a part of who we are. We've really, like, sought out our community to help us make big decisions about the house. We took plaster off of every fireplace, we redid the kitchen I mean, it was just a total overhaul. We added a little courtyard pool, and it was time. It was really time, and so, although it is bittersweet, I wanted to share the why behind that decision today.

Speaker 1:

So when we bought the house and we were living in New Orleans, we didn't know that we were gonna have kids. In fact, I think we both felt like we didn't plan to have children. However, after we got married, and we were married for a few years, I kind of had a change of heart and we decided to have our oldest so she's now almost four and then we decided we wanted to have a second, and so our youngest baby, when she was born, I think, really changed our perspective on life and really showed us the power of community and, more specifically, family. And it was the first time in my life that I really really came to appreciate more specifically my parents, even my siblings, although they aren't able to help us as much because they have kids too.

Speaker 1:

I just really, for the first time, felt like I can't do this alone and we can't do this alone ie, brad and I, I think we're very capable, we're go-getters, but children are like all encompassing. They need so much of your time, your love, your efforts and energy. And I really felt that purpose in my life. When I became a mother of one, I felt it. But when I became a mother of two, I really felt it. I felt so pulled to motherhood that I honestly hadn't felt anything like that in my life, and so I started talking to my friends about this.

Speaker 1:

I was like you know, I really think I want to be closer to my family, which they're not that far, okay, but it was a decision to move out of our house, for sure, and that was bittersweet because of all the things I just said, and that's why I spent so much time sharing it, because I wanted you to understand like the level of commitment that we had made to where we were right and like also, moving may meant potentially changing schools for the kids and driving more for work and all of these like hesitations, potentially not seeing some of our friends as often because we would be a little further away from them, and so it was just a very heart-wrenching decision. My good friend, which I'm so thankful for this advice she said do not make any big decisions until you're at least six months. Oh my gosh, I literally cannot say this. She said don't make any decisions until you're at least six months postpartum. And so I really heeded that advice and we didn't make any big moves.

Speaker 1:

But I started like taking note of my feelings and one of the things that my dad said. So my mom and my dad actually had come to stay with us in half of our double for about six weeks when my daughter was born, and it was so helpful and up until that point, like we saw them very often, we traveled to and from each other's houses. But my dad actually made a comment that said something along the lines of you know, this is getting harder for us and it's not to say that like we don't want to come visit, but I just want you to know getting in the car and like driving it just is getting more challenging. And so I started to realize that I might need to be very close to my parents, potentially even walking distance to them. Another huge factor was that last year Brad's mom started to get very sick and unfortunately that sickness progressed fairly rapidly and she passed away this year.

Speaker 1:

Outside of that at the same time, brad's stepmom was going through breast cancer treatments and I think, experiencing those two things simultaneously having lost my grandmother not too many years ago it's just been sort of a wake-up call about how impermanent our time here is on the earth and how important it is to not let life just continue to lead me, but for me to really sit and think about what I wanted out of life and, of course, you know, being married to Brad like what we wanted and what we wanted for our children. And so we really started to have a lot of conversations about that, like what do we want for our life? How often do we want to see our family? Would we like to see them every day, and what would that look like? Would we like to see them once a week, and what would that look like? How do we make this happen? We have worked really hard to set all of these things up in the way that we have and like there's going to be someone doing here. Is it worth it? What will we regret more? And you know this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks and we kind of just came to a place of realizing that what we felt like was most important was those things that I just described, and we wanted to make a personal commitment to making that happen. Meanwhile, brad and I had a lot of other conversations about life and you know what that would look like for him Because at the time, brad was working for an architecture firm.

Speaker 1:

Brad was working for an architecture firm, which he really loved and he was getting such great experience working for them, but also I think he was feeling a tug on his heart to, you know, be closer to family and also explore self-employment again, because he had run his own business for a long time. Brad, michael, architecture is his business and he missing that, like the autonomy and having your own business, the flexibility and what that would look like for our family, for us both to be self-employed again, which, if you are fully self-employed or your family is fully self-employed, like there's a lot of risk and responsibility. I don't know if you've ever tried to buy a home, but it is like they want all the paperwork and all the things, because being self-employed can be seen as risky. You know work isn't guaranteed, you don't have, like you have to provide your own health insurance, all of these things, so all of these decisions are sort of happening at one time, but we just kept coming back to what do we want?

Speaker 1:

A friend of mine actually recommended this values worksheet. I think it's by Brene Brown, but this was like so eye-opening for me. If you are in the process of making a big decision in your life, you've got to check out this worksheet. It's called the values worksheet and it basically forces you to choose out of a list of all different types of words. It makes you choose two words, so the words might be like family, love, activity, adventure, money, freedom, joy, happiness, like security, loyalty, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all of these different words. And so I probably sat with this worksheet for I don't know 30, 45 minutes, just thinking about like okay, and I would scratch out words anyway. I came down to two words, which were loyalty and security, and those words to me mean comfort of safety, a feeling of like, warmth and wholeness, and then, of course, like loyalty. It almost feels like that's a reference to like my family and giving back to them and how I can, like, share with them what they've given to me, and so I just really sat with that. I talked to Brad about like, what is important to him and ultimately we made the jump.

Speaker 1:

So once we decided that we were going to sell the house, which was the biggest part of the decision, because we were like, well, maybe we could move and like, still keep the house. But along with that came like, where are we going to live and what are we going to do? Which that's a whole nother episode but we decided that we wanted to build a new house after living in a really old house, to get a different perspective of design and adventure and like what that entails, which we're knee deep in the process and I can tell you it's got its own set of challenges, which I'll definitely do a podcast about at some point. But you know, to sell the house, we have two small kids, ages like three and a half and one. How do you sell a house with kids that age? Well, first of all, they can't be there when you're trying to list the house, according to our agent which I kind of agree with because it was crazy. So we actually moved out of our house into a rental.

Speaker 1:

Brad spent like 10 days away from me prepping the house, getting it ready for sale, fixing it up Like it was already renovated, which is the craziest thing. But then he kind of like you know, we took things off the walls, he'd patch them up. He made sure that everything just looked absolutely perfect. And I'm thankful he did, because the day we listed the house was the day we got a full price offer and, yeah, we went under contract. It was such a blessing, such a godsend. We're so thankful and we just like, honestly, still can't believe it. So the house went under contract. Of course, you go through all the aspects of like is this going to work out? And are we really selling the house? Oh, my gosh, like, are we making the right decision? And then, 45 days later, we closed. So we're a few weeks removed from selling our house.

Speaker 1:

And it's crazy, like, how much life can change, even when you don't think that it will. I mean, I truly, truly, truly thought that that was going to be where we were forever. I had like started recording videos of Brad walking out for school with the girls because I was like, oh, when they're, you know, taking their last day of school? I'm going to have a video of that and yeah, I mean life is just crazy like that. But I will say we could have just stayed in the house and we could have just continued down that path because it felt what was easiest moving, selling a house, switching schools, moving further away from work to some extent, like again, we're not very far, but it's like all of those things take a lot of courage, time, effort and energy and it was really obvious to me that it would have been so much easier to just stay where we were. But if I've had any takeaways from this, which, now that we've actually made the move and we're settled and we are seeing our like I see my parents daily now and we actually today saw Brad's dad and his step-mom. Thankfully she's doing very well now we see them quite often. We see my brother.

Speaker 1:

I mean it has been awesome and I will say this choosing a life that you're being intentional about, although it may feel hard and although at times you may doubt what you're doing because it feels unattainable or you're questioning like, is this really right decision, I think the best thing you can do is just trust your gut and trust that feeling inside of your heart, go back to your values and lean into that. Like anytime, I start doubting the decision, like oh my gosh, did we make the right choice? And, of course, like we miss deeply some of the things that have changed, but the truth is that my values are what I come back to and that's how I know I made the right decision. If you're feeling like there is a change that you want to make in your life I would be cute into it Don't make any harsh or like rash decisions. My friend who told me to wait.

Speaker 1:

I think that was really good advice because by the time that I did it, I realized that yes, this is really, really, really what I want, and it gave Brad and I time to work through it together. Make sure we were on the same page, but be patient. But also don't give up on the idea and know that things don't happen overnight. I swear if I was giving anyone a lesson in life, it would be that nothing happens quickly. It's like life happens quickly, but the progress in life it seems to happen very slowly, ironically enough. But don't give up on that. Don't give up on those dreams, whatever they are. I would say, like, lock in and take it one thing at a time until you get to that place of intention where you want to be. So thank you for hearing my personal story. I felt like it was much easier to just like share here on the podcast versus on stories or like personally DMing people, but feel free to like reach out if you can identify with this story.

Speaker 1:

I think being near family has been exponentially helpful for us as parents. I didn't realize the support that I was missing. We had an amazing sitter community. We had amazing friends in the area that we were before, but like being a little closer to family has been a blessing and just to see them and support them and help them in all the ways that we can has been really awesome. And actually we are now in the exact same neighborhood as my parents and we can like walk to their house and it just feels like amazing. So thank you for listening.

Speaker 1:

If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe. It helps us reach more people. Leave comments, leave reviews anything you can do to show that you're enjoying If there's something you'd like to hear. This was, like I said, a different episode, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about the why, because I do feel like thinking about your values and figuring out what you want and living an intentional life is a big part of happiness, and the older I get, the more. I realize that happiness is the key, it is everything, and so I'm on a personal mission to like, strive for joy in my life and to figure out how to get there, and I'm just excited for you to come along with me. So thank you for listening, thank you for being here. I so appreciate you and I look forward to you tuning in in the next episode. Bye.