Your First Glimpse

We’re officially calling the house ours today. Later today that is, after closing, if for god’s sake it actually happens.

IT’S OUR BEST DAY EVER. Thanks SpongeBob.

If you’ve been following the buying/selling/renting series, you know it’s taken a lot to get to today. Even after filling you in on our decision and ability to go conventional with our mortgage, the bank underwriters still demanded a lot of us and our mortgage teams and lawyer. Every day they seemed to need something else, an addendum, a new statement, a confirmation, and every request pushed our closing date out a day or two. We knew that buying a home as freelancers would be hard, and it was. I think we’re all pretty sick of hearing from each other and nagging one another, and I hope Pete and I never, ever have to buy another house again. I hope this is it.

We had our final walk-through of the property yesterday. We’ve really loved watching the property evolve from early-to-late spring (we saw the house for the first time in early April and here we are closing in mid-June), especially in how the property went from barren of leaves to completely engulfed and barricaded in its maturity. The lawn had grown to about a foot tall in the past few months, and we were glad to see yesterday that the sellers finally gave it one last mow-job for us; it’s lookin’ all fresh and proper and healthy. We explored more around the backyard during this last walk-through, completely enthralled in the privacy of the property and the natural wildlife setting that we were buying into. That’s when I posted these two photos to Instagram:

Because so many of you have been eagerly asking for photos/something/anything, I whipped up a little floor plan for y’all (when I move I get all Southern drawl-ly, I guess). It doesn’t do the house justice, no floor plan can, but I’m excited to share it. The exterior scale of the overall home is spot-on thanks to measurements taken at our home appraisal, so I duplicated that in floorplanner.com and built the guts from there. The room breakdowns are only about as accurate as I could guesstimate with my own eyeballs, from my own memory, based on the exterior shape of the home, and there are probably little nuances that I haven’t even noticed yet, like an extra window or a deeper-than-expected closet. A few notes about what you see are detailed below:

• Click on the image to make it bigger in your screen.
• The house has a perfectly modest ranch floor plan, I hope you weren’t anticipating something wildly different from what was ordinary during the 1950’s. The orange area is just over 2,000 square feet. What I don’t think is well-represented, even with the measure for scale, is how big the rooms actually are. It was a great selling point, and if I can post a video and some photos in the next few days, I hope you’ll be able to see what I mean.
• 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, which means it’s technically only a half-bath bigger than our old pad.
• There are a lot of closets (which we don’t currently have) and all of the closets have doors (which we don’t currently have)
• I think the builders went door-crazy, evidenced by the fact that there are two doors leading into the kitchen for reasons we can’t determine.
• There’s a light gray box shown on the right side of the living room. This is a half-wall stone indoor garden planter, so ’50’s cool.
• Our bedroom feels about as large as the whole second story of our old house. The living room is gigantic too. I need to master large-scale furnishing.
• The full bathroom is just about as big as a bedroom. That’s not an error.
• There are several picture windows, and cute little corner windows to boot. I love them all.
• There is a full unfinished basement, worthy of a tour of its own. It’s huge, its footprint sitting directly below all of the orange areas on the main level, meaning that it’s another 2,000+ square feet of potential awesomeness.
• The garage is really wonderful,  spaciously wide and deep for both of our cars. And it’s attached to our house, which neither of us have ever had, ever, ever, ever, in the history of our lives. Cool.
• Summertime is going to mean sunroom time, so you’ll probably be seeing me chillin’ out there a lot if you visit.

P.S. The first house we had an offer in on still hasn’t closed according to local listings. It’s the house we wanted for ourselves badly for about 5 months, but we’re glad to have moved on. I won’t be sharing the 4,000+ photos I took of that beautiful (ransacked) property, but for as long as it’s publicly available, you can see the listing and photos for that house right here.