Our House, Part One: Purchase

This month marks three years of living here in our cute little house. In some ways, it seems like it was just yesterday and in others, it seems like we've been here for an eternity.

This post will be one of three (maybe four) posts in which I relive the first few months of life with, and in, this house. This one is probably long and boring. The next few will have more pictures.

We closed on our house on January 27, 2006. A Friday. Twenty-seven days after I moved to Wisconsin. Thirty days after Matt proposed. And, about twenty-three days after we first saw the inside of it. Crazy, right?

Matt had done the majority of the grunt work on finding a house. He spent months looking. Considering that he looked at everything from duplexes to condos to single family homes to downtown neighborhoods to lake country and everything in between, a few months was not really that long. After finally settling on a duplex and a neighborhood, narrowing down the choices from there was easy.

He had been eying one particular duplex since the day it came on the market. However, the seller was not allowing any showings for at least a month. So, for that entire month, Matt drove by it, emailed me pictures and called trying to set up a showing appointment. Yes, it's safe to say that he was slightly obsessed, but he had lost out on several other houses that weren't even half as great as this one seemed to be, so he felt it was important to be aggressive.

When we finally got to see the inside of it, it was better than we had imagined: A side-by-side duplex (rare in an area full of uppers/lowers) with each unit featuring two large bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, hardwood floors, built-in china cabinets, crystal doorknobs, fenced backyard, fabulous neighborhood.

We bought our house from an elderly woman named Helen. She had lived here for about the past forty years by herself. She rented out the other unit for a reduced rent in exchange for the tenant helping her with maintenance and repairs. The day we came to see it, we were one of six groups of people looking at that time and one of four that made an offer that day.* We offered to let Helen continue to live there, which won us the house.

Helen proved herself to be a very sweet, yet very stubborn old lady. We met her several times between the time our offer was accepted and the time we closed. Understandably, it was fairly bittersweet for her. We realized it was probably hard for her to go from owning the home she lived in to renting from us. However, it was difficult for us to adjust as well. I had to really give her the side-eye the day that she told me that I would need to tell her anytime I was having guests over and that they couldn't stay too late or make too much noise. Scenes from the movie Duplex were suddenly flashing through my mind and I seriously questioned what we were getting ourselves into. But, we loved the house, LOVED the neighborhood and, after months of searching, Matt assured me that nothing else had even come close.

Being the young, strong kids we were, we were more than willing to do some grunt work on any house we ended up with. So, when I say that our house was perfect for us, I mean that it was in the sense that there was a lot of potential for the house to be perfect for us after quite a bit of work. Helen had done some updating on her unit, but the side that we were to move into had not changed since the day it was built. We definitely had our work cut out for us.

The apartment we were living in was cheap and we had a month-to-month lease, so it worked out that we could spend all of February working on our unit while having a place to live. I am so glad we decided to do things this way. If I would have had to live there while we were working on the house, I probably would have had a serious mental and emotional breakdown. A lot of the remodel work was stressful enough and being able to go somewhere else to sleep was a lifesaver.

In addition to just being all around excited about being homeowners, we spent a lot of time deciding what projects we wanted to tackle first. And so began a long, never-ending love/hate relationship with Home Depot and Lowe's.

Oddly enough, we didn't even go to the house on the day we closed. Actually, we didn't get all of our keys at closing. Helen couldn't find most of them and told us that she would look for them and give them to us. I think her exact instructions for us were to ring her doorbell when we came to the house and needed to get in and she would use her key to open our door for us. Yes, she had keys to the doors to our unit and, yes, she was keeping them. So, without keys to our house, we weren't really sure if we wanted to go there that same day. We went the next day instead, where Helen had a brown paper bag FULL of keys for us.

And this is really where the story begins.
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*Keep in mind this was when the market was still strong and good properties were hard to find and went quickly. In thinking about that, it's almost hard to believe that just three short years ago, the market was still doing so well. Is it just me or does it seem like we've been in this slump for forever already? When, in fact, it really hasn't been that long. Scary.