49 How We Met Our House

  As some of you may already know, we refer to our house as Cottage8, because it was the eighth house we bid on, and finally got. But what you may not be aware of is the story behind it. The details of how we met our house, and the journey we took to get here.

 

Take a young, anxious couple, excited to purchase their very first home, add one tough cookie of a real estate agent, and mix in a bunch of cash-in-hand investors bidding up every charming dream home you bid on, and you have the perfect recipe for seven long months of looking at over two hundred homes, in four different cities, accompanied by tears, endless pages of contracts and addendums, meetings with lenders, more tears, and finally: Joy.

 

The day we discovered this house (the soon to be Cottage8) was an early Sunday morning and I was scouring the internet for available homes for sale in our area. Just listed was this shy little blue house with nothing more than dirt in the front yard, and a large piece of plywood covering a front broken window. The price was within our budget, so I pulled Adam out of bed and we drove straight over to see it.

 

This house had been vacant for at least seven months, so we took the liberty of peeking into each of the windows to check out the layout front and back.

 

 

Knowing we would likely have to compete with a number of cash-ready investors, we called our realtor and had her rush straight over to let us inside the house so we could do a walk through. Not even sixty minutes later, we were signing papers and placed our bid on this house.

 

The kitchen countertops were so sticky, we had to drive to a local eatery just to find a hard surface to complete the lengthy paper signing process…

 

 

 Yes, there were plenty of (scary) decorative flaws that we had to look past when we bought this house, and we didn’t even think twice. With lots of elbow grease and a ton of imagination, Adam and I took the dining room from this: 

    

To this:

 

 

And the kitchen went from this:

 

 

To this:

 

 

And our living room went from this:

 

 

To this:

 

 

For more before and after photos, and thorough details of how we remodeled this house and lived to talk about it, please click here.

 

Blogged for An Nicole’s How I Met My House Party.