Sometimes Things Go South. I Get It.

Buying a home in Mexico sounds pretty dreamy when you're sitting in Canada in February.

Sunshine. Tacos. A pool. Maybe a margarita.

The part people don't put on the vision board is the paperwork, the money, the decisions, the things you don't know you don't know — and the possibility that sometimes, despite doing your best to do everything right, shit goes south.

I know.

Because it happened to us.

We had the dream. And then it felt like we'd lost it.

Our Mexico story moved pretty quickly.

We went to Cabo for a family vacation, visited family in Los Barriles and fell in love with Baja.

Three weeks later, we were back.

Eventually, we chose La Paz. We bought our lot over video chat and started building our home in Mexico.

We were excited.

We had plans.

And then our first builder didn't do what he was contracted to do.

We lost money.

Worse than that, for a while it felt like we'd lost the dream with it.

I'll never forget standing on our lot in Mexico in tears.

We met with five different builders, trying to understand what had been done, what needed to be fixed and how much it was going to cost us to fix someone else's mistakes.

I remember standing there looking at what was supposed to become our home and feeling completely overwhelmed.

This was not how this was supposed to go.

Then we found the right people

Our Realtor had sold us the lot.

That was her job.

She wasn't our builder. She hadn't sold us a finished home. What happened with our construction wasn't her responsibility, and she had absolutely no obligation to step in and help us fix it.

But she did.

She stood on that lot with me. She cried with me. And then she helped us figure out how to move forward.

She helped us meet with builders and find someone who could take what felt pretty broken and turn it back into the home we'd been trying to build.

And eventually, we found our builder.

I will be eternally grateful for both of them.

Our builder didn't just look at someone else's mistakes and see a construction project that needed fixing. He understood what that house meant to us. He brought experience, solutions and, just as importantly, empathy.

Neither of them could undo what had happened.

They couldn't give us back the money we'd lost or make the experience disappear.

But they could help us figure out what came next.

And they did.

Slowly, the thing that had felt like a shattered dream started looking like our home again.

And then we got the house

Not the version we'd originally imagined getting there.

But the house.

Our house. And better.

The pool was finished. Our things moved in. We found our favorite restaurants and grocery stores. Karlee started school.

Eventually, we weren't talking about what it might be like to build a life in Mexico.

We were living it.

And that doesn't mean nothing ever goes wrong anymore.

Sometimes more shit happens.

Pool equipment breaks.

Water pumps die.

Something needs fixing while we're in Canada and suddenly I'm on my phone trying to figure out what happened, who can look at it, what's covered and what it's going to cost.

That's not Mexico.

That's owning a house. That's life.

There will always be something.

But the lows aren't the whole story

It's really easy to tell the disaster stories.

They're interesting.

What gets talked about less are the thousand completely ordinary moments that made all of it worth doing.

Sitting outside with my coffee.

Watching Karlee jump into our pool.

Taking her to school in Mexico.

Heading into La Paz for dinner.

And the people.

We've made friendships in Mexico that I genuinely believe will last a lifetime — friendships that don't stop at the border.

Recently, we packed up as a family and road-tripped down to Idaho to visit friends we originally met in La Paz. We weren't just welcomed into their home. We were welcomed into their extended family.

I don't think I ever imagined that part when we bought a lot in Mexico.

We thought we were building a house.

We ended up building a life that stretched across countries.

And now there are people and places on both sides of the border that feel like home.

When I put all of that against the hardest moments?

The highs are so much bigger than any of the lows.

I'd do it again.

Maybe that's why I understand the overwhelm

I didn't need a mortgage to build our home in Mexico.

But that didn't mean the process was easy.

So when someone comes to me overwhelmed by financing, documents, timelines, different countries, different rules and a whole bunch of things they've never had to think about before, I get it.

You're not just filling out a mortgage application.

You're trying to build something.

Maybe it's a retirement you've worked toward for 30 years.

Maybe it's somewhere to spend the winters.

Maybe it's an investment.

Maybe it's a completely different life for your family.

Whatever it is, when something gets complicated, it feels bigger because what you're working toward matters to you.

I can't promise you that nothing will go wrong.

Nobody can.

But I can help you understand the financing, work through the problems that come up, find answers when I don't have them and help you figure out what the next step looks like.

Because sometimes you don't need someone to tell you everything is fine.

You need someone who understands why it matters and is willing to help you figure out what comes next.

Our Realtor did that for us when she had absolutely no obligation to.

Our builder did it when he took on a project someone else had left behind.

I haven't forgotten either of those things.

And I think about it when someone trusts me with something that's important to them.

Because when I look at the life we eventually built on that lot where I once stood crying?

Every damn step was worth it.