The House Story, Part I

The week of Thanksgiving we noticed a house a couple up from ours had gone on the market.  Its been a college party house since we’ve been on the street so we went to look at it, thinking Shaun could get it cheap, fix it up and rent it to a couple grad students. 

It was horrible in most every way and about $100K overpriced.  Shaun ran the numbers and couldn’t make them work even if we got it super cheap. 

In the meantime, his juices started flowing, knowing the market is prime for buying right now.  

He and the realtor (also a friend) got talking and Chris mentioned that a house a couple streets over was on the market and they walked over to it.  (I had left by this point to go take pictures for Amanda's class).

Later, when Shaun told me about it, I knew which house he was talking about because Riley (our old dog) and I used to walk past it all the time.  I always noticed what a gorgeous house it was, in addition to the well kept LARGE lot on a quiet street.  

A couple days later we went to see it and REALLY liked it.  Though the square footage was smaller than ours now, the setup just made more sense for our family.  Plus the location was amazing.  

Shaun immediately did a TON of research, spent a couple days at the townhall digging through records, figuring out why the taxes are so darn high, etc. 

Initially we were thinking we’d move there temporarily so Shaun could safely fix up our current home without little kids around (lead paint, etc) but we knew if we moved there, we’d want to stay, so we switched the plan to stay here while Shaun fixed up the new place, then move once it was how we wanted it.

We were ready, kind of excited, but since it was bank owned we knew there was a scheduled price drop happening that we wanted to wait for (we were expecting it before Christmas).  

HOWEVER, on January 1 we learned from our realtor that there was a contract on the house...we'd missed out...someone else had it.

To be continued....