There’s nothing quite like putting yourself on record about something and then promptly changing your mind. Take these little slices of humble pie, for instance – so good they made it onto trivia napkins at our wedding:
As you know, my relocated-from-Dallas, in-love self has been house-shopping with her pink-shirted, very relationship-material husband for some time now. It’s been pretty painful. But it’s also been full of funny moments, in a trying-to-maintain-a-good-sense-of-humor-about-things way:
I mean, finding the perfect house after making losing offers on other houses for months, but then realizing the basement ceiling is only 6 feet tall… that’s funny, right? Who does that happen to besides us? So we moved on and bid on another house… and then were beat out on said house. And then we looked at another house, and it was teeny tiny and too expensive anyway, and then we drove a block over and sat in front of the short basement house a while. And then it hit us:
We don’t need the basement for that house to be the perfect house.
And so we flashed back to how we felt in that house before we walked downstairs. We felt good. The house was built in 1906, and creaks in all the right places. It’s a ten-minute walk from our Metro stop of choice, and the same walk to some of our favorite shops and restaurants. It’s an end rowhouse, so it has a side yard in addition to tons of light inside. There are details begging for a renovation, but nothing dramatic needs to be done, and it’s absolutely ready for move-in. It has my favorite kitchen of any kitchen we bid on – big, bright, room to eat and play and hang out, needing updates but not desperately so, not until it was time. It has three bedrooms upstairs, rendering the basement just an extra-large storage and laundry area, not an area we have to use if we expand. Maybe one day, we thought, we can figure out how to dig out the basement economically, or maybe we’ll discover that the quote we got was astronomical, or maybe we can dig it out incrementally.
And so we jumped, and we put it an offer, famous last words and all.
And guess what? We got it.
We embarked on the fastest close we or anyone we know has ever heard of… ten days. And guess what? The ten-day close ended two weeks ago.
We’re homeowners!
For real.
{all images courtesy of author’s personal collection}
This is going to be fun.
Twitter: @nodakademic
So cute!! We crossed our (now owned) home offf the list too, when we were looking. Our “no-nos” were an awful lacking of closet storage, and a tiny single full bathroom. Eventually we realized that two people can make something like that work, and it was a good price for an otherwise awesome house. So happy we bought it! (Ours was built in ’29…yay, old houses!) Congratulations.
Congratulations! This house looks absolutely adorable.