Steph 
We didn’t originally pick this house when we were out looking. This house was way too basic for us and lacking in upgrades we needed. We knew we liked the builder, which was a huge deciding factor ultimately. The original owners had some structural upgrades done when they had the home built that made the house a decent choice for us. But honestly, there was just nothing special about the house other than liking the community and the few structural upgrades that had been done originally.
The landscaping was very basic. It had way too much grass for me. The floors were pretty terrible, carpet in the dining room and linoleum in the kitchen? Not for that price. The colors weren’t my favorite, but an easy fix. Almost everything was builder basic. The house had some nice trim on the first floor, but it was standard issue for this builder.
We had a home built with the same builder a couple of streets over when we were first married. This was the floor plan we wanted back then, but couldn’t quite swing it, so we had built the smaller version. We had sold that house 15 years ago, and since we sold it, it had remained our gold standard and no other home we had was quite like it. We knew we liked the community, and it was kind of special to us since we were one of the first families to ever move into this community.
Even so, we passed this house up on the first pass. It was simply too expensive for what the house had to offer. I couldn’t imagine paying that price for a house that, well pretty much everything, needed to be upgraded. So we chose a different house. One that was over $100k less, which meant our payments would be far cheaper. The house never felt quite right, but it fit our financial plans, so we proceeded towards closing. Around a week before closing, after we had already moved out of our rental, the house didn’t appraise at the contract price. We were unwilling to budge, the seller was unwilling to budge, so we walked away. So now there we were with four kids, 4 storage lockers full of stuff, and nowhere to go.
We dropped everything to scramble to find a different house. We visited house after house, none of them felt right. This house was still here. We came back once, twice, three times. I was honestly having a hard time paying this for a house with linoleum floor in the kitchen, old carpet, outdated tile and an unfinished basement. We went on a desperate search for a different house but just couldn’t find a reasonable substitute. So we bought this house because it was the only home we had not ruled out entirely.
In retrospect, it was a much better buy than the cheaper house we went for at first, but it looks like a 2003 time capsule. We lived in the house for almost two years without doing anything except some landscaping. At around my year and a half mark I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was improve all of the stuff I hated or just move again. Because I’m sick of moving, I chose to get started. At the end of 2020, I started the journey of updating the house, decorating it and making it feel like mine.
