And Did I Say Ugly?

You now know how my husband and I began our journey to fixer upper status. So lets talk about our current home. Why this one? Because it is the dream, or will be one day. We started searching for a larger home when we had my second child. Not in a hurry, just if the right one happen to be for sale we would purchase it. Fast forward three years, another hundred houses or so and pregnant with my third this house came on the market in our price range. The year before we had walked through this house and it was too expensive. I told my uncle, our agent, when they would take $350,000 ( they wanted $450,000 at the time) to call me because it had potential. A year later (yes, it sat on the market that long) and the magic number was the starting price.

What makes this house so appealing is that it is in Germantown city limits and it is sitting on two acres with everyone around me also having two acres or more. Baby deer play with their parents in the side yard, the red fox runs around the trees out front and at night the owls hoot to let you know they are there. The house is off on a private road that looks like a driveway. You don’t even know it is back here. I get all this and still have a three minute drive to Target. The dream……So, like me, your thinking “wow, beautiful” right? First look, this house is ugly. The floor makes the most stable person feel like they are falling from all the dips in the floor. The kitchen is straight up out of the 80s from the appliances to the U shaped island. At some point the microwave must have caught fire because the inside of it was melted to an unusable state. This house only has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and clearly the owner loved shades of pink. Not a single room in the entire house had been updated since the home was built in 1984. The master bedroom had a pink toilet and a pink tub complete with a duck head faucet that spat water. After I left the home the first time I couldn’t place where the laundry room was, then went back to find it in the second bedroom closet. 3500 square feet, most of which is not used in an efficient way. And did i say ugly? No one wants to touch this house, to most this isn’t a project worth taking on. This is just first look, not even getting into checking into see if you missed anything important. I told a friend about us buying this house, only mentioning a few details to her, before she proceeded to call for her husband to exclaim that we had bought “that house” and he knew exactly which one she was referring to.

Many see a house like this and would run but my husband and I see the tall ceilings, beautiful double wood burning fireplace, and sunroom overlooking this beautiful yard. We see the potential a lot of people overlook and everyday since we have moved into this house, which has lots of improvements still pending, we look at each other and say how much we love this house. We see the potential and we have only fixed the fixed the first 2300square feet. If you can look past the small details and see that potential is there you too may be able to take on a fixer upper, save some money and make your house a home you love to come home too.