Home Sweet Home

***LONG ALERT***LIKELY BORING ALERT***

OH man, we have been through the ringer with this home buying thing. We started looking at listings back in November. We would follow houses we like and try to narrow down our scope on price, style, location. We would canvas neighborhood and drive around to see if there were certain neighborhoods we really likes. **Funny story** We would just bust out the GPS and take turns picking places to drive to and scope out. Chris would tell me to look on the map for areas with a bunch of streets as those are generally large subdivisions. Without fail, I would always lead us to a trailer park. hahah It would be this heavy concentration of streets so I would assume it was a bunch of houses. A bunch it was, but not quite what we were looking for.

Anyway, the first day I went looking I fell in love with a house. It was just a great layout in a neighborhood we loved and there were so many features that were more than we were hoping for. After a little research though, we realized this might not be the best bet as the sellers had some shady dealings and the home needed some repairs.

we moved on and increased the volume of homes we saw. It was soo hard to go looking at homes with Saylie. If it was a resale I didn't want her touching people's things and if it was a foreclosure I didn't want her touching ANYTHING. hahah. There were a lot of tears! at one house she climbed into the kids bed and started fake snoring. EMBARRASSING! After striking out and not loving the selection, our Realtor convinced us to just look at a short sale house in a neighborhood we were in. DIRTY TRICK! We fell in LOVE with this insanely perfect house. It was out of our comfort zone on price but we felt like we had to make an offer. We were expecting them to egg our house and be so offended by our lowball offer, but instead they countered. we negotiated for a long time and agreed on price, but then the crazy seller starting making insane demands on terms. He wanted 5 months worth of his mortgage in non refundable earnest money. (WHAT THE HECK?!) He also wanted to close in two-three weeks. He wanted us to get a mortgage through his office, where he was a branch manager. Sadly, we walked away and watched the house sit on the market. they kept dropping the price until it was sold for less than our initial offer. It was a hard house to get over. It was just so awesome!!

But we moved on. We had seen this listing for a long time that was just so different than anything else out there and so purely out of curiosity, we went a looked. It was a 175 year old, historic home. It had a billion rooms and crazy unique and beautiful architecture with tons of charm. We just fell in love with that house. We took a long time to decide if were crazy and brave enough to go after it, and while deciding, the listing price was dropped 45k so we jumped on it. It was so exciting to look at it and think of all the potential. We were so excited to restore it and we just loved all the little special things it had hidden in it. We paid for every inspection in the book and then while reading through 60+ pages of inspection "to do's" we just felt like it would cost more than the purchase price to make it what we wanted. and so again, we walked away. it was so sad and i still love love love that house and purposefully drive by to longingly check it out. We went to the historical society and had all the documents on it and pictures of it back in the day and pictures of former owners who had a lot of clout and history to their profiles. It was just the coolest house ever.

How do you rebound from a house like that? Nothing felt special any more because we were tired and disappointed. We decided to take a look at a house we had previously seen, but disregarded because it was overpriced. I had been thinking about it a lot and felt like it might be worth a second look. The more time went on, I just felt like it was the one. We walked through and decided to make an offer that day. Luckily we did because another bid went in that day too. Saylie totally won us points by making friends with their daughter over a Dora kitchenette and they said they liked us better because we close quickly. We promised them we would get the ball rolling and the earliest we could, we would close. Even though we weren't the highest bid, we GOT IT!

We closed April 27th. this house is totally opposite of our beloved historic home. We can focus our attention to furniture and upgrades rather than furnaces and insulation fixes. We are so excited to be DONE and be moved in. Feel free to come visit! (interior pics still to come...)