When people admire my parents’ home with it’s mid-century-modern esthetic and beautiful pool where we all gather in the summer, Mom likes to tell them that it all started with an airplane ride.

It was 1978, and she was 28 and a newly single mom of two young girls, ages four and eight, when we moved from Alaska back home to Spokane. In the weeks preceding her move, she sold everything except our clothes, kitchen stuff, and one lamp — and as a result had $2,000 in the bank. The woman who sat next to her on the plane just happened to be a Realtor, and when she realized Mom’s situation, insisted, “Do NOT buy furniture with that money. Everyone has furniture they don’t want. Let them give it to you. Use that money to buy a house.”

Fast forward eight weeks: The day we moved into our new house, Mom was unpacking in her bedroom when I slid open her closet door from the inside, stepped out and announced happily, “Hey, Mom, we have the same closet!” Yep, the closet had a front and a back door — one closet for both bedrooms.

Our new home was all of 600 square feet with an unfinished, spidery basement. The “gold” kitchen walls turned out to be a cheerful mint green hidden under layers of gooey nicotine. Mom and Aunt Mary caught up on each others’ lives while scrubbing the walls until their arms felt like Jell-O. Over the next few weeks, Mom got used to wiping down the bathroom walls any time she ran a bath because the steam caused even more nicotine to ooze out and down those walls in thick streams.

Mom trusted that the furniture piece of the puzzle would work itself out, and it did. (Maybe I’ll go into that in a future newsletter.)

Several months later, Mom met Paul. They married, and soon sold the tiny house at a good profit which they used to help finance a split-level house across town, closer to my grandparents.

Mom and Paul finished that basement, and when we outgrew that house 11 years later, the profit helped finance their current home.

​out buying her tiny starter house but for the conversation with the woman on that plane, and my parents couldn’t have bought their current home (that now has six bedrooms, 3.5 baths) without that starter house and their stepping-stone journey.

My younger sister Julia, who’d grown up hearing the story of the woman on the plane, decided to buy a starter house just after she graduated from college. A government program offered first-time buyers a rebate of $8,000. Julia’s furniture consisted of hand-me-downs from family and garage sale bargains. She focused on getting a house, not the perfect home. It wasn’t a perfect place, but it was a start.

You might enjoy watching Julia in the video above (shown standing in front of their current home) as she talks with Tony Byrne from Heritage Home Loans about how she used a government program to buy her first house, and how buying it led to the next house and, eventually, to her family’s current home. There are still government and lender programs just as helpful as the one Julia used. We, at EvoReal, would be happy to explain the programs to see if one might be a fit for you.

The average person doesn’t buy their forever home the first time out. They parlay an imperfect starter home into the next, less-imperfect home and into the next, hopefully, closer-to-perfect home. I see way too many young couples caught in the trap of thinking they need a Pinterest/HGTV home as their first home. They see homeownership in terms of extremes: “perfect” or “fixer upper,” but there is a middle ground. (That, too, is a conversation for another time.)

I always say, “When it comes to a spouse, raise your expectations; when it comes to a first house, lower them.” Remember, when you start down a path, you don’t start with the last stepping stone; you start with the first.