Intro and Welcome!
Hey everyone!
Welcome to our blog! We are Evin and Rick, and we are proud first time home-owners. This blog is supposed to be a documentation of our home renovation/restoration/projects, all of which we are new to! But we wanted to start out with a little background about how we found ourselves at the house on Lyons Place!
After a long stint of city-living, we decided to become real adults and purchase our first home (after living with Rick's dad for a year to save up enough money to do so...). We started the process slowly after we moved out of the city in May of 2017, and then became more serious once we got a little stir crazy at his dad's (3 people in an apartment can be a bit tight).
We knew (kind of) what we wanted (rustic with some character and old feeling but with modern touches...some land..maybe...close to restaurants...not a ranch....ok maybe a ranch is fine...no wait definitely not a ranch...), but we found it increasingly hard to find a house that fit our criteria. We both loved the idea of being able to fix up a home, but it started to feel a bit daunting when all the "fixer uppers" seemed like they were more work than they were worth. We finally found a house we loved that had just been put on the market, with a half acre and a beautiful new farmhouse sink. We decided we loved it enough to put a bid on it. We wrote a nice, sweet letter about how we wanted to raise our family there... all that good stuff. We started dreaming of all the things we could do in the house. We were so excited. We didn't get it. Le sigh. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Fast forward to February 2018, with 4 more unsuccessful bids placed on houses (ALL of which had farmhouse sinks...we started to hate them after a while), and we were feeling discouraged. It seemed like anything that was in our price range that was what we thought we wanted got snatched up within days. We felt super pressured to offer more money than we were comfortable with, and to make quick decisions when we weren't quite ready. One house we showed up at for an open house had a line going out the door with interested buyers....it had been on the market for one hour. A townhouse was starting to look good to us.
Finally, a house that had crossed our Zillow paths more than a few times came up again, and even thought it was in a town that neither of us was familiar with, we decided to take a look. We fell in love. It was an old house, built in 1914, but it had good bones and it was warm and cozy inside. Of course the way the owners had staged it helped, but something felt right about the house. It had been on the market since November and had come down in price, so we thought we would have time to think about things. Of course, that night we got an email saying that they had received a few other bids and wanted best and final by the next day. We agreed to go forward and found out a few days later that our bid had won!
We were so relieved, but we had no idea of how long the process was going to be going forward. After the inspector found a few issues (like that the roof would need to be replaced within the next 3-5 years), we put together a long list of negotiating factors and had several contractors come look at the house. We were asking for quite a bit in sellers concessions, but these were all things that needed to be done to the house, and quick.
Well, this process took about 2 weeks of going back and forth with the sellers, but after a 4 day stint of silence and nail biting, we finally found out the good news...the sellers agreed! We got the house!
Now we could sit back and sign our lives away at the closing, and then start the process of tackling all the items on our list of things we wanted to improve. Step one: painting the basement and putting in a new floor....and this is where we learned about what it means to own a home. Stay tuned for updates! Moving day is tomorrow.....
Us after closing!
With the keys to our new home!
Welcome to our blog! We are Evin and Rick, and we are proud first time home-owners. This blog is supposed to be a documentation of our home renovation/restoration/projects, all of which we are new to! But we wanted to start out with a little background about how we found ourselves at the house on Lyons Place!
After a long stint of city-living, we decided to become real adults and purchase our first home (after living with Rick's dad for a year to save up enough money to do so...). We started the process slowly after we moved out of the city in May of 2017, and then became more serious once we got a little stir crazy at his dad's (3 people in an apartment can be a bit tight).
We knew (kind of) what we wanted (rustic with some character and old feeling but with modern touches...some land..maybe...close to restaurants...not a ranch....ok maybe a ranch is fine...no wait definitely not a ranch...), but we found it increasingly hard to find a house that fit our criteria. We both loved the idea of being able to fix up a home, but it started to feel a bit daunting when all the "fixer uppers" seemed like they were more work than they were worth. We finally found a house we loved that had just been put on the market, with a half acre and a beautiful new farmhouse sink. We decided we loved it enough to put a bid on it. We wrote a nice, sweet letter about how we wanted to raise our family there... all that good stuff. We started dreaming of all the things we could do in the house. We were so excited. We didn't get it. Le sigh. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Fast forward to February 2018, with 4 more unsuccessful bids placed on houses (ALL of which had farmhouse sinks...we started to hate them after a while), and we were feeling discouraged. It seemed like anything that was in our price range that was what we thought we wanted got snatched up within days. We felt super pressured to offer more money than we were comfortable with, and to make quick decisions when we weren't quite ready. One house we showed up at for an open house had a line going out the door with interested buyers....it had been on the market for one hour. A townhouse was starting to look good to us.
Finally, a house that had crossed our Zillow paths more than a few times came up again, and even thought it was in a town that neither of us was familiar with, we decided to take a look. We fell in love. It was an old house, built in 1914, but it had good bones and it was warm and cozy inside. Of course the way the owners had staged it helped, but something felt right about the house. It had been on the market since November and had come down in price, so we thought we would have time to think about things. Of course, that night we got an email saying that they had received a few other bids and wanted best and final by the next day. We agreed to go forward and found out a few days later that our bid had won!We were so relieved, but we had no idea of how long the process was going to be going forward. After the inspector found a few issues (like that the roof would need to be replaced within the next 3-5 years), we put together a long list of negotiating factors and had several contractors come look at the house. We were asking for quite a bit in sellers concessions, but these were all things that needed to be done to the house, and quick.
Well, this process took about 2 weeks of going back and forth with the sellers, but after a 4 day stint of silence and nail biting, we finally found out the good news...the sellers agreed! We got the house!
Now we could sit back and sign our lives away at the closing, and then start the process of tackling all the items on our list of things we wanted to improve. Step one: painting the basement and putting in a new floor....and this is where we learned about what it means to own a home. Stay tuned for updates! Moving day is tomorrow.....
Us after closing! 
With the keys to our new home!
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