How Did We Get Here?

Blogging. Truly something I never thought I'd do. I mean, who honestly has that kind of time? Most certainly not me with a husband (Chris), a nine-month old sweet, beautiful, wonderful baby boy (Declan), a full-time job, and only six hours into a 30 hour MBA program. But here I am, writing my very first blog post ever (Xanga does not count, right?), and all because Chris and I have decided to take on what may be the biggest project of our lives. We bought a foreclosed home, and as simple as that may or may not sound, I'm talking about a foreclosed home that needs MAJOR work. A complete gut job, if you will. Speaking of, here's a nice street-view of our over 2,600 square feet beauty (or beast really, for the time being anyway):

So, there are two things that I really would like to accomplish with this blog:

• Document our family's journey of this trash to treasure project
• Receive reader feedback, ideas, helpful hints, how-to's, money-saving tactics, and basically any generally helpful information when it comes to the many (and I mean MANY) house renovation/remodel projects we are about to embark upon

With that being said, I would like to take a little time to tell you all how we got here. Here being two young people, now with two mortgages (yay for debt!). Now I would like to think that Chris and I are reasonably down-to-earth, logical, intelligent people. We aren't ones to typically jump off the financial deep end into such a risky project like this one, but this house is our exception. The truth is, we would not have made the bold decision to purchase this home without selling our current home if we didn't think that this house was truly "the one". Our forever home.

We found this house by simply driving around town one day, browsing through all of the houses we wish we owned. We had been searching Trulia, Zillow, and basically every imaginable source for a bigger house on the west side of town for months. We love our current 1,180 square foot house already on the west side of town, but the simple fact is, if you put anymore people (or babies) in this house, it will literally bust at the seams. We told ourselves, "We need a bigger house for the future so why not start searching now?" We probably went to look at 20 houses in the area with our realtor, and none of them were calling our names. None. Well, I take that back. One was calling Chris' name, but I discretely shut that one up :) (Love you babe!) Then, that one day while driving through a neighborhood on the west side of town, being those creepers driving by slowly and eyeballing everyone's house, we came across this place. It looked terrible. The roof looked like it was about to fall in, there was no grass in the front yard, the fascia was rotting, the gutters were falling off, and when we stopped to take a look, the neighbors had many things to say about it. None of which were good. We called our realtor anyway. We just had to see how bad it really was on the inside.

Well, here is just a sneak peak of what we discovered:

Front Door Entryway.

                   

Kitchen

Living room with french door patio access-view from kitchen

Living room with french door patio access- view from fireplace

Hallway to bedrooms-left after entering front door

Formal living room-immediate right after entering the front door

Formal dining room -view from formal living room

Formal dining room- looking into the kitchen

Guest bathroom-first room to the right down the bedroom hallway

Yes, that's blue tub in the guest bathroom

Bedroom 1-aka Declan's room

Bedroom 2-my office until baby 2 comes :)

Master bedroom

Master bathroom-so tiny

Pantry off of kitchen

Hallway to our big den-view from pantry

Half bath-first room down hallway to den

The best den EVER

We fell in love! We could obviously see the amount of work that needed to be done (detail of said work will come later), but this house was in THE perfect neighborhood, WAY more than our minimum square footage requirement, had THE perfect layout, and we could tell it was well-built. Just not well-maintained. (I could slap whoever let this house go to crap like this.) And I LOVED the back patio. (pictures of that area to come.) Chris and I wanted it, and we wanted it bad. But, as some of you may know, buying a HUD-owned foreclosure (or I guess any foreclosure for that matter) is very similar to pulling teeth. Difficult. The house was listed at $135,000; way too high for a house in its condition. So we decided to make a low-ball bid on the house. HUD, of course, rejected our initial bid, so what did we do? We waited one week, and made the exact same bid :) It was once again rejected. We expected that, but we refused to pay anymore more than what we were offering. We knew if we paid anymore than that, we would instantly be upside down on this house. We had every intention of waiting one more week and making the exact same bid when we got a call from our realtor. Our first thought was that the house had sold, but to our surprise, HUD had actually lowered the listing price by $17,000. Surely by doing this they were hinting at us to submit another bid. Surely. So, we did. This time we increased our bid by $2,000, but asked HUD to pay $1,300 of our closing costs. Compromise, right? Well, the bid was rejected again. So we thought, well screw these guys, and we were done at that point. We told ourselves it was not meant to be. Then about three days later, our realtor called saying that HUD had changed their mind and accepted our bid! Wait, what?? Can they do that? Well, yes, yes they can. They are the government after all;)

So here we are, after a thorough inspection, termite inspection, appraisal, all the pre-closing yada yada yada. WE OWN THIS HOUSE!  It is ours, and it is one hot mess. But we are SO excited! It is going to be a long process to get it up to where we want it (our current goal is an optimistic six months), and we are going to need help, advice, and lots of encouragement from you guys!

So from here on out, sit back and enjoy the updates because we are going to include you in every bit of this journey. And to our friends and family, feel free to just randomly show up to help out or just hang out. Whichever. We will provide the cold drinks:)