The search continued, I looked at houses on my day off with our realtors, who we really liked, which was good since we were going to be spending a lot of time together. After a few weeks, I had looked at 70 houses, and there was nothing we wanted to buy. I think there as maybe 1 or 2 other houses that we looked at twice. We were now into October, 3 weeks from moving and had no prospects for houses. Our realtors suggested that we expand the area we were looking to buy in since, I had exhausted all options in St. Louis Park, Golden Valley, Hopkins, and New Hope. They wanted us to look in Plymouth, which I believe my response was "I will live in Plymouth over my dead body". I have nothing against Plymouth but the whole point of moving was to get much closer to the city, and Plymouth still seemed very far out. Well Ben saw a house online, fell in love with it, didn't tell me about it and casually asked our realtors to add it to the list of houses to look at. The night before we went to look at houses, Ben let it slip that he loved this house, the yard was great, it is by a school, the street is quiet, and "It has a 4 car garage!".
The house was in Plymouth so I was less than thrilled, also after looking at the pictures, the kitchen was hideous. I had basically decided I would humor Ben, and go look at the house but that was it. We went to the showing we looked. The house was much bigger than I wanted, but it had a few nice things, 5 bedrooms all on one level (that were all decent size), a big living room and dining room, an attached garage. There were many negative things, it had ugly carpet in half the house, and everything was outdated, the project list was terribly long. If it hadn't been for Ben's deep love for the house, I probably would have walked away. I really hated the house, I couldn't picture living there, but over the next few days I started to research some projects, decided I would consider it, and we did a second showing. The second showing my parents, my aunt and uncle and my cousin were there. It was wonderful to have them all look at the house, but I was beyond over whelmed, my project list was multiplied by about 80. :) We did decide it was a house we could grow into, it had good "bones" and we were going to make an offer. The house had been on the market since the beginning of summer, had dropped the price on the house by $40k, but was still over priced for all of the work it needed. We made an offer $35k less than current price of the home, knew our offer would get rejected but that was my caveat for buying the house. We had to get it at a price where we could still afford to do all of the projects it needed. The buyers countered back at 10K under asking, not surprising, and Ben and I left to go to Washington DC for 10 days.
We decided it the house was still for sale when we got home we could talk about making another offer but while we were in DC we were taking a break from houses. Ben was super nervous the house was going to sell, I was still working through house renovation plans in my head. We got home from DC, they sellers had dropped the price by $15k, and I went to look at other houses. Ben and I were pretty sure the sellers were not going to come down to the price we wanted. At this point we were 7 days from moving out of house. While I was out looking at other houses, our Realtor casually mentioned that the sellers realtor had called and wanted to know what they could do to get the deal done. I found a house that I really liked that day, it was a lot less projects but also a lot smaller than the house we had been negotiating on. That night Ben and I decided to look at the house I liked, and then the house he loved again. We decided to make another offer on the project house. The sellers countered again, and at this point I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much money on the house that needed projects.
We packed up our old house, moved most our belongings into 2 storage units and moved our necessities into my parents house. We were going to live with them for 6 weeks and if we had no plans after 6 weeks, we were going to move to an apartment for the winter. We cried when we left Sandy Lane, it was the house where we fell in love, realized we could survive renovations together, and where Ben proposed. That house was a labor of love, and when we left it, it was a beautiful house. The fact that we had no plans for a new house, made it a whole lot harder. We continued to look for houses to come on the market, but nothing was coming on the market. After about 2 weeks at my parents, we went to an open house on Sunday that my aunt had alerted me was going on, it was in Golden Valley, it seemed to meet the requirements of what we wanted. We went to look at it, and it was disgusting. It smelled, it was dirty, it was smaller than house we had been making offers on, and it was $20k more than what we were currently at in negotiations. At that point, I realized that we were not going to find another house, which as much space as the Plymouth house for the price we were at in negotiations. On our drive home from the open house, I turned to Ben and said, lets buy the Plymouth house. Ben was a good sport, and made sure I wasn't just saying that because we had no other options, and then he was soooo excited! I was finally sure we wanted the house, so I called our realtor and 20 minutes later we signed papers to buy this house on our phones in the parking lot of a grocery store.
We survived the inspection without any terrible news, began really planning for the projects and prepared to move in. Moving weekend went really well becuase we had wonderful friends and family that all came to make the weekend a success. A special shout out to those who helped clean, it was a disgusting job and we really appreciate your help. So now I am sitting here writing this from our couch, at our new house, full of projects, in Plymouth. Ha!
The good news, there should be plenty of blogging happening about projects in the future.
Here are the pictures of the house from when it was on the market:
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| Th e master bedroom, nice blue carpet...right? |
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| The Kitchen, painted counter tops, sticker black splash.... |
For the record, now I really do love our house, and I am very glad we purchased it! We have already done some projects, so stayed tuned, more posts to come!
Cheers,
Ali
