Sunday, August 13, 2017

We Sold, We Bought, We Moved

Holy moly, y'all. This summer has been crazy. Let me see if I can give you the short version....

It's been a dream of mine to have my own antique home. I really love Craftsman homes but basically anything earlier than the 1930's has me swooning. So a little over a year ago, my in-laws moved from 2 minutes away from us to 10 miles South of us- into their own 1915 fixer upper...


Every time we walked in their house I was dreaming of having my own. We'd already started talking about moving ourselves as the area we were in was getting a little too congested. It helped that our best friends also live in the same town as my in-laws. So basically we were there all the time, anyway.

About 3 months ago we were talking to my in-laws about a future move. At the time, we were just starting a master bath remodel and said bathroom was completely demo'd to the studs. About 2 blocks from my in-laws sat a 1912 home that had been on the market for over a year. Which, in the DFW market is a very long time. I had actually seen the home and met the owners just after I got my Real Estate license. So in this conversation, we start throwing around the idea of buying that house. I contact the owners, we go look at it.. Decided we want to buy it if it's still on the market once we finish our bathroom and can get our house ready to list. So, I'm talking to my lead agent about this house we want to buy but can't buy because we had a demo'd bathroom... she basically makes me an offer on the spot. We discuss, we accept. Easy-peasy.


So we make an offer on the 1912 house. It was for sale by owner, so I write up our offer, we negotiated a few things, our option period begins.

We anticipated that the 1912 house needed a lot of work. Just walking the exterior of the house, we knew it needed a new roof, possibly peer work, wood work, paint, updated electrical, etc. The inside had been completely updated in the 60's so we also had plans to tear all of that out and see what we could find/ restore. I won't bore you with the details but to make a long story short, during the inspection process, we found out the work that the home needed was more than we were cut out for. We couldn't come to an agreement with the owners so we terminated the contract.

I thought that I would be heartbroken because I really did love the house. It could have been so perfect. As the cost of repairs needed kept going up, I really had to put my emotions aside and try to make a logical decision. Could we have bought that house? Yes. Could we have done the repairs? Yes. but was it the best thing for our family? Absolutely not. In the end I was completely content with ''we gave it our best effort and it just didn't work out.''

So, back to the home we were selling... We busted our rumps to finish the master bathroom and other cosmetic updates that needed to be done. My MIL and FIL spent an entire weekend working with us to help us finish. The next Monday, my MIL came back and grouted our shower while my husband and I worked our real jobs. We moved forward with selling our house in hopes that something else would come along. My lead agent was buying our home as an investment property to rent out so she assured us that we could stay as long as we needed. We fully expected to be her tenants for quite a while as I had something very specific in mind for our next home. Specific age. Specific area. Specific price range.

About 2 weeks later, I saw a cute little house come on the market just 2 blocks away from my in-law's house. We checked it out. We liked it. We made an offer. We negotiated. We closed. We moved!

Our ''new'' cute little house was started in 1949, has a grand total of 1300 sqft, and 3/4 acre of land. It's not the 1920's Craftsman home that I've always wanted but it's perfect in it's own way. We can see for miles from our back deck (which is very hard to find in North Texas) and almost an acre of land (which is also very hard to find in DFW).

Click here to find out why we decided to sell our previous home just before finishing a 3 year remodel.. and stay tuned for the ups and downs of buying a home built in 1949, why we decided to downsize and how it's working out for us. In the mean time, I thought I'd share a few pictures of our new digs. I took these when we first previewed the house...





We're so excited to get to work on our new home. We've already got some pretty big plans for this place and I can't wait to share them with you! Be sure to follow me on Facebook for more updates along the way!


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