So we have a bit of crazy major news we want to share with you. Rather than beating around the bush, let's just cut to the chase.
We bought a second house!
No, I'm totally serious, we actually bought a second home with actual doors, windows, and walls. And get this, unlike that house I was trying to convince Wendy we just had to buy...the creepy Victorian one on 50 acres in case you missed it...the one we actually bought has, get this, functional plumbing!
If you're a regular reader here, this is likely coming as a somewhat massive surprise since we haven't shared any of our search along the way for fear the purchase might not actually go through, that we might not buy a house, and we would be all build up and no bang. But now that the house is ours, we'll catch you all up to speed, sort of.
Flash back to 2003 when two kids had the brilliant idea to buy an historic fixer upper. As fresh faced newlyweds without a clue about what it takes to renovate a home yourself, we bought our first home almost 12 years ago. Since that fateful day, while many of our friends and co-workers have encountered changes in their lives that have required them to move on from their first homes to accommodate those changes, Wendy and I have been happily living in and working on our 15 foot wide Old Town Home in the city with no thoughts of selling. Sure, we have momentary inclinations of sale in the midst of arguments when we are simply overwhelmed with our home and the ongoing state of our projects, but those moments are fleeting at best, and we typically love our home and where we live beyond description.
So rather than selling, we've been working on our house for nearly 12 years, and there isn't a room or area we've not updated in some major manner. While we're nowhere near complete on the miles long list of projects we'd love to undertake and still have ahead of us, we're also winding down on the "must complete" items and have started to think about tackling the "dream list" items. And many of those "dream list" items could simultaneously be put on the "Wendy is going to kill me if I keep talking about these items" list.
At the same time we've been working on our own home, we've been touring other houses. Whether we were looking at local open houses (like those we've discussed in our Open Housing series of posts), going on historic home tours, wandering into houses (both museum and private) while on vacation, or just browsing on the internet, we're somewhat house obsessed and just can't help but look and dream.
Well, wouldn't you know it, that browsing began to morph into something a bit more real, and several years ago Wendy and I started kicking around the vague idea of purchasing a second home as a sort of "weekend retreat." It all happened after spending a little time at a few B&Bs, some weekends at friends' homes, enjoying our time while on relaxing familiar location vacations (Napa Valley, Carmel-by-the-Sea), and having some sadistic masochistic desire to pour our hearts and souls into another home while continuing to work on our wonderful row house. However, our browsing was probably about 95% daydream and 5% reality, but we were browsing nonetheless.
As time went on, our perusal of listings started to mature, and Wendy and I both set up real estate searches matching criteria we were both interested in for a home. (Wendy's career as a Realtor no doubt also helped make this dream a reality.)
Predictably, all I cared about was age, the older the better. Give me a 250 year old house pretty much anywhere within five hours and I was happy. Oh, and I wanted enough land to allow me to build my own personal field of dreams, complete with corn field.
Wendy's tastes had far more to do with location, or more specifically, water. It didn't matter the age, quality, or architecture of a home, but give it a nice water view and you had yourself a winner in her eyes. The amount of space needed was small, and she especially didn't care for my Field of Dreams idea, I can tell you that for sure. Of course a Christmas staircase, a bathtub, and great space to entertain were high on her list.
We continued periodically (and by that, I mean constantly) looking at the various results being returned, and as we looked, our criteria continued to evolve and narrow. We were looking at colonial farmsteads of 10 acres or more as well as little waterfront bungalows on barely a postage stamp of land. The houses ranged from built in 1750 to 2014. And our distance from home went from a quick 20 minute drive to a three hour trek.
The more we looked the more we refined. We looked at what was important, what we were trying to achieve, how we wanted to use the house, how often we wanted to be at the house, how it could work with our schedules, how it might work with our friends' and family's schedules, how much work we wanted to do to the house, how much relaxation we wanted to have, and so many other variables it occasionally made our heads spin. The thing that kept us centered in the search, and the thing that constantly reaffirmed our desire to purchase a home were the idyllic scenarios we had concocted in our heads.
Both Wendy and I wanted a place where we could spend time with friends and family, away from the constant buzz of the city, enjoying the things in life that too easily pass you by when you're going 24x7, and we wanted that to be a place we could absolutely make our own. We pictured cool nights in front of the water around a crackling fire pit. We envisioned relaxing with a book with the sound of crickets and water in the background. And we kept focusing on the possibility of using our DIY skills and knowledge to help make the right home the perfect place to meet our needs. But what exactly was the right home?
Through our spousal negotiations, ongoing market analysis (listing stalking), discussions with those friends and family who we hope will spend lots of time with us, and lots of scenario daydreams, we finally narrowed our search to something more specific. We agreed we wanted a waterfront house that required anywhere from a moderate to significant amount of work, somewhere within a maximum two hour drive from our home. The age, amount of land, and just about any other feature was negotiable, other than the fact that it also had to have functional plumbing (that was Wendy's addition).
After our very lengthy search and many trips to see many different houses, we finally landed on the home we'd eventually purchase. However, coming to this decision wasn't an easy choice by any means. We ultimately had several different real contenders for homes that we visited multiple times.
I'm very sorry to be such a tease with this, but before we share our new home, we're going to show you our three top choices in a House Hunters style roundup of blog posts. Our plan is to share them over the next several weeks. During that time we'll give you a rundown on each house, our opinions on their pros and cons, and a rough overview of our "vision" that helped us to consider the houses.
Don't worry, we'll still be doing plenty of projects on and blogging about our Old Town Home, because it's still our first love. But we'll also have lots of fun topics to cover in this new house. It may not be a 15 foot wide historic row house, but we hope you'll like it and enjoy this next adventure we're embarking on.
So what do you think? Are we simply house crazy people, or does this sound like something you can get behind? Perhaps a little of both? Likely a little of both? Yeah, probably.
