House Hunters: Blue 11 Edition

Hi friends! I’m here today to show you our new house, but I thought I’d make it a little more fun by turning it into a House Hunters-esque post. So, just like the show, I’ll take you through three houses we toured, and at the end you’ll see which house we ended up getting!

House #1: The Pool House

This was a beautiful, big house in a great neighborhood. The homeowners had put a lot of work into updating it and it showed: they had a beautiful kitchen, modern bathroom with large walk-in shower, and a gorgeous finished basement. Plus there’s the show-stopping pool with the fantastic patio. And unlike a lot of houses with pools, this one actually had room for a dog: there was a separate fenced-in side yard that Finnley could run around in.

• Pros: Move-in ready, great for entertaining (pool/patio and basement), updated kitchen and bathroom
• Cons: Over budget, expensive upkeep for pool, already updated so no way to choose my own finishes

House #2: The Historic House

This house from the 1920’s was absolutely gorgeous! I fell in love with it as soon as we walked it. It had great original (or original-feeling) features like hardwood and tile floors, brass light fixtures, stained glass windows and doors, and even a fountain inside the house! It also had beautiful formal gardens that I could totally picture throwing a Gatsby-themed party in.

• Pros: All the original features listed above, the gardens, just an all around impressive home in great condition
• Cons: Expensive to keep up, the kitchen needed updated, small showers, neighborhood wasn’t quite as safe as others we looked at

House #3: The Basic House

This was a perfectly nice house under our budget. It had lovely features like a finished basement and a great screened in porch, plus it backed up to a pretty wooded area. It was move in ready, but the master bathroom could definitely use an update and I wasn’t crazy about the kitchen. The only thing we’d really need to do right away though would be to build a fence.

• Pros: Low price, pretty backyard, great screened-in porch
• Cons: Overall kind of a boring house

Sooo…which house did we choose??

 

Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because we actually put an offer on all three of these houses!

We started with the Pool House. It was a really nicely updated home, and the pool was an awesome bonus. But it was over budget, so we tried to negotiate to get the price down. Unfortunately, the current owners weren’t able to meet us in the middle so we had to walk away.

Then we found the Historic House and I fell in love. It was priced at the top of our budget, and we only went back and forth a couple times before agreeing on a price. Once we were under contract we moved forward with an inspection. For being about 90 years old it was in really good condition, but it had a few problems that would have been quite expensive to fix (roof maintenance, friable asbestos, radon, and a buried oil tank), and we just didn’t have the cash to do these things right when we moved in. The current owners weren’t able to fix any of these problems, so we had to walk away from this house and move on to plan C.

By the time we got out of our contract on the Historic House we were in a bit of a time crunch. We were already under contract on our old home and we needed to find something quickly or else we’d be living in a hotel all summer. So we toured a few more houses and found the Basic House. It was nice, and it’d work well for us, but it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the other two homes. We made an offer though, and we were able to close on it without any issues.

So this is our home! It took me a little while to get over the disappointment of losing the Historic House, but I think this is a really good home for us. Both the Pool House and the Historic House cost a lot more money upfront, plus they would have taken a lot of money to maintain. Our Basic House is much more manageable, plus we have more room to make it our own. I also really love our neighborhood, and I was little iffy about the neighborhood of the Historic Home.

So in the end, I think things worked out exactly how they were supposed to   I’ll be back next week to show you more photos of our new house and our plans for making it our own.