Finding The One

One evening we saw a whole bunch of houses, and were starting to feel a little impatient about finding something we wanted to live in. The last house we saw that day was this one:


I don't know why we didn't take any pictures inside, but all we have are our memories. I'll start with the good. Walking through that house, we (all 3 of us) were like kids in a candy shop. The layout was awesome and spacious! The stained glass, decorative fireplace and woodwork were original! The kitchen was new and fabulous! There was a screened-in porch overlooking the backyard! OMG the finished attic was SWEET, with built-in dressers and everything! The BASEMENT was the best, with a lighted bar and a ton of rooms!

But the bad: the house was bank-owned & vacant, and Every Single Damn Radiator had blown out, a telltale spray of soot giving away the lack of winterizing. Completely new heating system needed. THEN, in the last room we entered, in the farthest reaches of the basement, we were greeted by my ultimate dealbreaker, MOLD.

Talk about letting the wind out of our sails. We walked away from the house like this:


Carrie reassured us that Berwyn has lots of houses like that. So why hadn't we seen any that were quite that nice?

The next day Jed was mulling over the house that broke our little first-time househunter hearts, and on a whim, wondered what would happen if we increased our upper range by $2000. If maybe we were looking on JUST the wrong side of the range for a higher caliber of houses, and knowing that an extra $2000 on the list price would probably make a negligible difference in an eventual purchase price.

So he ran a search on Realtor.com and found a house on the same block as the other house, same style of checkerboard brick bungalow, traditional sale, nice pictures, listed at exactly $2000 over our original range. Realtor.com can be deceptive--you'll find houses listed as For Sale that are well into negotiations, or even already sold. So he called Carrie, not daring to hope that this pretty house could still be available. Well, it was! And we went to see it that week! And it was awesome! The nicest house we'd seen in all of our Berwyn home shopping.

By this time we knew we wanted to make an offer on it, but we wanted our parents to see it first--to get their approval and their eyes. We knew our dads would see bad things we were missing. So we arranged to have the 6 of us go back to see it that weekend. We spent 45 minutes in the house, going through all the rooms, then through them again, assessing the space while everyone, especially our moms, exclaimed over how great the house was. The only thing was the owner was there working in the yard, so we tried our best to keep poker faces when he was within earshot. The fact that we were there for so long probably gave us away, though. As we left, we exchanged subtle glances & parting words with Carrie, who was going to do research on the sales history & put together the comparables for an offer. We were so excited!

Househunting

We got pretty good at weeding out houses via the descriptions on the listings, and not wasting our time in houses that were clearly not our bag. We went really strong with the house hunt for about a month, going out multiple times a week if possible. It was fun and exhausting. Here are some (lengthy) highlights:

In our first outing we looked at two houses that we fell in love with via their MLS listings. Both homes were built in the early 60s, and we were excited to see them. The first one was a well-kept little ranch with an amazing basement. Wouldn't you want to hang out down there? It's complete with the basement bar so prevalent/essential in Berwyn, with a "summer kitchen" just beyond that far wall:

But "little" is the operative word here. The 2 bedrooms were OK, and the basement was pretty enormous, but that didn't really make up for the fact that the kitchen and "dining room" were NO BIGGER THAN 8x8 feet each, with really no room to expand either space. The only other common space up there was a teeny front room.
Oh well, it was fun to see. On to the cute split-level on the great block!It had a nice yard, three bedrooms, and holy crap, flocked wallpaper. FLOCKED WALLPAPER!

The kitchen was an OK size, but there was no dining room. It started to dawn on us that this might be a dealbreaker. Then we investigated under the carpets throughout the house and found ASBESTOS FLOOR TILE everywhere. Asbestos floor tiles are fine if you don't crunch into them or otherwise mess with them, so you can always just lay other floor over them, but the ceilings were already pretty low and the thought of all that asbestos tile wasn't too attractive to us.

Goodbye, cute split level, it was fun to explore you.

There are a bunch of short sales and foreclosures on the market in Berwyn right now, which we mostly avoided because though there are some RIDICULOUSLY cheap houses out there, the process of buying one and getting a loan for it is a lot hairier, they tend to need a ton of work, and the buyer is responsible for any repairs required by the city (which the seller in a traditional sale would usually take care of). The listing for this house, though, made us want to see it. There were no interior pictures on the listing, and we wanted to see all of the big rooms. Doesn't look too bad, right?


But oh my, look at the steps:
This was an excellent preview of what we found in the house. When we got to the top of those treacherous stairs, we found a sign indicating that the house had been vacant since sometime in mid-2007. Awesome. I didn't get any decent pictures inside because there was no electricity, but just imagine room after room of falling-in walls, stripped-by-overuse wood floors, filthy carpet, and a pervasive cat/rodent aroma. Yum. We saw some bad situations, but I think that house was the worst.

We kept seeing houses that were nice, but that we couldn't live in for one reason or another, like this one in the same great area as the split level:
The finishes were so lovely--the floors, stained glass, light fixtures, kitchen cabinets, nice finished attic, this cool built-in:
But dammit, there was no dining room and thus, not enough living space. Goodbye, cute bungalow.

Viewing this house was in interesting experience:


Because it turned out that this single-family home had been converted into three separate, locked off apartments--one on each floor. Now, before we closed on our house we URGENTLY HAD TO sign an agreement that we would not split up our house into more than one residency, under SCARY PENALTY OF LAW. Berwyn, City of Homes, is pretty serious about their housing stock. The house was big and had some cute details, but required too much work. I wonder if they ever sold the house, and how that city inspection went.

This house was nothing special, but they managed to put a full bathroom into an undormered attic:
That possibility, while a little outlandish, pings hopefully in my brain every time I think about how freaking expensive it will be to put a dormer in our attic.

This next house was incredibly well-kept. Like, they clearly remodeled in the 80s, then proceeded to never wear shoes, treat anything roughly, or touch any surface with dirty hands. The listing agent put in the comments section "PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP." I wonder if they were proud of this monstrosity of a long-converted, formerly coal-powered boiler taking up half the basement::

Finally, our odyssey included some houses we could very realistically see ourselves living in. This one was the first:

It had lovely, large rooms, lots of ways we could get creative with it, and the old sleeping porch had been converted into a giant closet for the master bedroom. We saw it early on, and went back to see it again--thinking that if we liked it as much after the second viewing we would make an offer on it. Well, we liked it less, and found several things that we either didn't really want to live with, or feared would be out-of-control repair issues. Oh well.

Later in our search we saw another house that had a whole lot to love, including an amazing basement and this kitchen:

We would have probably thought more about making an offer on that house, were it not for the next house we saw...

What We Wanted

When we first met with Carrie, she asked us a lot of questions about what qualities we were looking for in a house, what we had to have and what we were willing to overlook or work on. We figured we'd end up in a bungalow, but if we could luck into a cool ranch or split-level that would be great--ultimately, good layout and design were far more important than the style of home. Hardwood floors and natural light were pretty crucial. Well-preserved original details were a plus. We knew we'd be a blend of picky and realistic--having looked at lots of houses before, we could walk away if we saw a dealbreaker, and we'd know very quickly if we walked into a house that could be our home.

These are the hard-and-fast criteria; what we used to weed out listings we considered:

• Two or more bedrooms, at least one of which had to have dimensions of 10' or more*


• If two bedrooms, also additional living space beyond the living room/dining room


• Nice kitchen or cheap house that we could afford to redo the kitchen


• Space to park 2 cars on the property, preferably in a garage


• No stucco


• No mold or damp!

I think these were good criteria--not too specific and definitely not unreasonable for the market and what we could afford. Not like the HGTV Househunters people who walk into a 3-room master suite and demur, "I don't know, it's a little small," or say "Oh, I hate the paint color," or how about "I liked that house, the curtains were great."

The only thing that changed over the course of our search was the kitchen thing. We saw several listings that had completely gutted kitchens, and many foreclosures with no kitchen appliances--which sounded attractive because then we'd be able to choose all the details of our kitchen. But we learned that apparently banks are reluctant to approve loans on a house that's not "immediately habitable," which includes having an operable kitchen. Strike 1. Then it became clear as soon as we started looking--we found ourselves looking for a kitchen we could live with and ruling out the houses with kitchens that needed to be ripped out. We wanted to move pretty much right away, and realized that we weren't prepared to jump right into anything besides cosmetic improvements.

*Unless you're used to living in buildings built more than 50 years ago, this might sound tiny to you... but we saw many 2-3 bedroom houses that had bedroom sizes no larger than 9x9, and it's not at all unusual for at least one side of a bedroom to be closer to 8 ft. A bedroom venturing into the 12-14 ft range is positively enormous in the realm of most Chicago-style bungalows.