I always like how Jeff on Bravo's Flipping Out refers to houses by their street name. "Valley Oak", "Gramercy", "Spring Oak" all sound much fancier than jut their street address. I refer to our new house as "Thorncroft Ct" in Jeff Lewis style.
After the wedding, we started to look for a new house. We had pretty simple expectations: 3+ bedrooms, 1.5+ bathrooms, 1500+ sq ft, nice floor plan, yard, good neighborhood, master bathroom attached to mater bedroom, attached garage, basement, old wood floors with only a little work needed and in our budget. I mean that isn't asking to much, right?! ;)
We spent most of the winter weekends looking at every house in town that went on the market. We left no stone unturned. Thank god for the Real Estate One, and the ability to have access to listings as soon as they come online. Nick and I would check it as much as we checked Facebook and Twitter. Even with all of these viewings we really were underwhelmed with the inventory. We found one house that we spent some time considering and almost put an offer on twice. But something didn't click with us. After a while the fun wore off, and frustration started to kick in. I was fraud we would never find something that we would love. I didn't want to settle, but t felt like we would have to. Good houses were getting snatched up as soon as they hit the market.
One day, a house came up on our app, but it had no pictures. The description sounded nice, but we had seen that before. Some pictures came up and we immediately called our real estate agent and made them come out the next day.
As soon as I walked into this house, I had a different feeling. What would you think?
Floral wallpaper everywhere, orange carpet from the 70s, what isn't to love?!
I think some homebuyers would go running for the hills, but not us! This was our perfect house. 2200 sq ft, 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, attached garage, nice yard, old wood floors, renovated bathroom off of the master, and 3 blocks from our condo!! We loved it but had other houses to see. I felt giddy leaving that house, I think I knew it was the one. We went back to another house that we had been debating about. We sat in that kitchen for an hour debating on what we should do. We went home that night still not sure of what to do.
We woke up the next day and we decided to make an offer on all of the wallpaper in that house! The next day we were under contract and on our way to a closing date in April! We were ecstatic to finally find something that met both of our wish lists and was in our budget!
We had 45 days to get all the paperwork complete and plans made for our new house. We had wallpaper to remove, floors to rip out, floors to put in, painting, counters to rip out, cabinets to paint, counters to install. We had so much to decide on, and we worked quickly. We closed and started our first demo April 12th. Our first mortgage payment is due tomorrow and we are all moved in with no wallpaper!
Prepare to have many DIY posts on our many redo projects!
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