Why! Why! Why! Chpt #1

The above question is what many people are asking us. WHY WHY WHY do you want to move. You have the perfect set-up. You have a house inside the city limits, four blocks away from a major shopping center, one half mile away from the country and you are right next to a nature preserve with deer, raccoons, hawks, ground hogs, and more birds then you can count on BOTH hands (you can tell most of our friends are city people).

The house is in pretty good condition for a 40 year old house, it gets plenty of shade in the summer and plenty of southern sunlight in the winter. WHAT could be possibly wrong.

What is wrong is that we did not pick the house. It is not OUR house, it will always be DJ’s parents house. The key word is “house”. It’s a house, it’s not a “home”. That my friend, is a big difference indeed.

When Mel and Betty (DJ’s parents) decided they no longer wanted to take care of the upkeep of their home they asked us if we could help them out and move into their home on a Land Contract.

Hard to turn down.

So we bit the bullet and moved from a 1700 sq ft apartment to a 1350 sq ft house as described above. It seemed like the smart thing to do.

This was six years ago and after the excitement wore off DJ started thinking this was not HER home, it was her parents home, and I was thinking that while I really liked WHERE the house was, I was not “in-love” with the house.

We were both fighting these feelings. We decided to make upgrades.

But the feelings were not going away.

We would go on random drives and always slow down when a “For Sale” sign was spotted . . . . . .NOT that we were looking.

Until one day, a bright sunny day in a small town, a new development, sitting quietly by itself (at the moment) was a spec* house. One of the smaller house’s in this new area. And it was sitting just far enough from the 18th fairway of a nice golf course to not be in REAL harms way (more on this in later blogs) for golf balls.

We stopped and circled the house looking in the windows. I went into the surrounding area looking for golf balls, how close were they coming. Hmmmmmmm!

We looked at each other with glints in our eyes and smiled. It did not look exciting from the outside, but inside had some real signs of character.

Two weeks later.

We had now been shown 6 houses for sale and we always comes back to the original. Nothing was even remotely close. It had to be a pretty special house to draw our attention (Nature Preserve and all that)

Our agent (which we had known before) looked at our house to assess what we could get for it and told us a few things we could fix up here and there, nothing much (to HER). I mean, yea – painting four rooms is only one sentence right? Until you actually have to do it. Or replacing a door to the three season porch is just one more sentence, until you have to take it off when the temperature IS ZERO!

When time comes to put our house up we should ask $214,000. There are NO houses for sale in our area. Nobody ever moves, nada. Very very stable. Our agent drove around and said “There are no house’s for sale ANYWHERE around here.

Our neighbors house sold for 2,000 under asked and it took 10 days, three years ago. She also said that even though the media talks about a slow down in housing, it’s not slow at all here in Madison.

The house we are looking at is $229,000, down from $249,000.

ANYWAY!

It is Saturday, December 16th and we were just approved this morning for a loan and we’re a little pumped up at the moment (besides having colds).

THAT is the background.

My goal for this blog is to show the ups and downs of what a common “never done this before” person goes through when buying AND selling his first house. Do we know what we are doing? Heck no. We are trying to stay one step ahead and are constantly reading other forums such is the HGTV message boards and books and sucking as much info as we can. We are trying to be human sponges (which is actually the way my head feels like at this moment, I hate colds).

But I’m sure as you all know – experience is the true way to learn. It’s always something!

I welcome ANY comments and hints from anybody that reads this.

Our next step now that we have been approved is we‘re going to have two more views of the hopefully new house. One with just DJ and I. Looking deep into the house, I mean REALLY look at it. We will make a decision at that point. Then a week later we’re having my brother, an architect who was featured in House Beautiful a few years ago (sorry, for some reason I felt this had to be said, I mean, where else can I say it casually, not at bowling or anything) take a look at it so we can see his point of view.

If it’s a go we will put in a bid.

And then all hell will break loose, the true adventure begins!

So – I have more to say but that is enough for the moment.

Hang on, stay tuned and pray for us!

Rod and DJ.

*1.speculative house are what builders build to get things going in a new area.
or
*2. a new house built to sell and make money