Monday, March 2, 2009

The Search for Home Continues...





So, as you know, we've been looking for homes & I want show you where we've been on our journey so far. If you don't know our story: we are YFBers (young, fabulous & broke) and are looking for a TOTAL fixer-upper that we can turn into our beautiful home. We're workhorses and aren't afraid of much except insanely expensive foundational issues & building restrictions.



Here is a house we WERE considering until a few things came to light. Believe it or not, it wasn't the beer bottles everywhere, the mattresses in outdoor sheds, the lazyboy chair in the backyard, the windows with BLINDS BETWEEN THE PANES (wow! someone must've really thought he was onto something when he invented those!!!) or the nasty kitchen that scared me... I was actually excited by all these flaws...


The house is 5 minutes from my parents & Tyson's, on a nice street in an "up-and-coming" (meaning hasn't come up yet & still has lots of homes with excessive amounts of lawn furniture next to beautiful homes) neighborhood and is on HALF AN ACRE backing to a stream & GORGEOUS, TOTALLY PRIVATE WOODED PARKLAND.





When we went into the backyard it was just amazing. When we set Chistian (our 20 month old) down in the yard, his eyes got really big & he just took off running. (Definitely got teary-eyed.)




Continuing into the backyard there were these 2 lovely sheds (below) where it looked as if people had been living!!! (I was still excited by the storage & would move them to a less obvious spot.)




And here is the living room and dining room: I had big plans to bust out a bedroom & open up the living room & to open the kitchen to the living room. In a couple of years, we'd expans the back of the house, add on another level on & put the bedrooms upstairs . I really love the floors & think all they'd need would be a little sanding & a few coats of polyeurothane. All I can say is that we actually wen into houses that looked worse than this inside:




Check out the kitchen (below). eeeeeek! We'd totally have to redo it which is what I plan on for any house. The whole house is only 884 square feet.






The scary hallway to the bedrooms:





So, it turns out that because the house is within a certain distance to the stream which leads to the Cheseapeake Bay Watershed, we would have major issue with building an addition. (permits, the addition would have to be a certain size & would maybe not even be possible) SO we said goodbye to this beauty.

..........................



Lucky for me we found ANOTHER!!!! :) I am SO EXCITED and cannot contain myself but a million and one things have to go right in order for this next one to work. It's farther out (which we didn't want to do unless we were getting something really special) and will be (again) a TON of work & the owners were SHOCKED when I told them we wanted to actually live there & not tear it down. We'll just have to see what happens but I am going CRAZY with anticipation. (It's really a long-shot.) I'll show pictures & give details when I'm not afraid of jinxing it so much!! (or I might get too excited & post tomorrow!! My family thinks we're nuts but I'm hoping you creative types will understand ;) ;)


Anyone have any guesses??

xoxo