05 Sep Our Second House

We purchased our second home with very specific criteria and were fortunate to find it, avoiding the alternative which was most of our stuff going into storage and a month to month lease at an apartment somewhere while we sought out our forever home.  Our criteria for a forever home was and is vastly different than the average American mindset.  We wanted a home large enough that we could grow into with a kid or two, but small enough that we wouldn’t have to move out of it as empty nesters and down size.  The house trade up trap (or downsize trade down) is a real thing, and we really wanted to land somewhere we could see ourselves staying forever.

We bought the first house we saw during our house hunting week, we looked at nine to twelve others, but it came down to a few things: Location, location, location, and the criteria above.  Outside of the aforementioned items and comments, the things we loved were that a lot of the interior work that we had to do to our townhome had already been done here, yet there was still significant room to improve so the home was not at the top end price range for homes that were more newly remodeled with crazy high end finishes.

We liked white cabinets, doors, and trim which were already done.  The floors, however, were honey oak finished and we eventually had them refinished five years later to our liking which is a darker classic look with matte finish on top and they transformed our home! The house needed new carpet, but we decided to live with it for as long as we could, at the time of writing this my carpet is 80% cleared off and will be a 100% cleared off tonight as the carpet installers come tomorrow, just 6 ½ years after purchasing the house we are finally getting rid of carpet that should have been replaced before we moved in!

The home is settled on a lot that is just under a half acre, in a 1970s neighborhood with tall trees, it’s very green, and the neighbors care for their properties closer to meticulous while not being snooty.  We didn’t know we were buying the world’s best neighbors when we purchased but we quickly found out through dinner and drinks invites, impromptu front yard gatherings, and tool/resource sharing.

Our back yard in the summer time has tall and thick enough trees and lilac bushes that line the cul-de-sac we are adjacent to, and the result is you can’t see anyone else’s house seven months out of the year so we have a deep sense of privacy.  The back yard was very woods-like in an overgrown sense, there was just junk grown everywhere, downed trees, brush piles, garbage hidden here and there, and about two years in, I had a vision of it being grass.  Not perfect grass, but grass that I could let grow for five to six weeks to lay down a bit and provide a nice clean ground cover then trim it and let it grow again.  I ripped out by hand, every single suckling tree, buck thorn shoot, buck thorn tree, you name it, I ripped it out of the ground if it was legal and not a mature tree.  We rented a trailer and hauled all the brush and excess wood to a disposal site and craigslist posted the downed trees and guys came with chainsaws and took the wood for their own burning needs.  I had a clean slate canvas at that point, roto tilled the entire yard (boy do I use that term loosely) and planted grass.  Everyone said I was crazy, it’s too shady, it’ll never grow! Challenge accepted.  I watered it at four forty-five a.m. until I had to leave around seven or seven thirty a.m., I came home at lunch most days and watered and worked from home, and I watered every evening moving the sprinklers to two or three different positions to hit everything.  It worked! I grew grass in the shade and because I planted it both deeply in the tilling and shallow via raking afterward, it continued to germinate throughout the spring and summer that year and I created that ground cover I had sought after.

I realize this is a lot of detail about my property but frankly we are proud of this place, we love it here, we adore our neighbors, some of them are like third and fourth grandparents to our son, we simply can’t imagine leaving this place until perhaps after they have moved on.  While our home isn’t perfect, and there are projects we’ll continue to do and improve, we live in a very nice well above average home from a quality and finishes standpoint, we didn’t break the bank and we continue to improve it in pieces to avoid a windfall of cash disappearing in the name of luxury when it should be invested.

We purchased this 1,950 square foot home in 2013 while the market was rebounding but not out of control yet for $237,000.  While we’ve made some improvements that have helped, the market has done the majority of the work in regard to appreciation and at the time I’m writing this (summer 2020, get out of our lives, Covid 19…) our home was recently apprised for a refinance at $315,000.

As I mentioned in the opening, I’ll mention in the close.  We have no intentions of leaving, we bought what we believed would be our forever home.  If we ever leave, it would be because of a major income increase and we’d want to live on a lake.  If that were to ever come to fruition, we’d probably still keep this home and turn it into a rental so that we always had the option of coming back, plus a 2.75% thirty- year fixed mortgage is a hard thing to let go.

While it is hard to know what your forever home might look like, hopefully this message can help you find that balance between contentment versus complete minimalism, and the alternative of luxury and best and highest priced home in your neighborhood.  As one of my favorite clients always said upon my exit (she is old enough to be my mom), “Make good choices.”