As with any story, I feel it is best to start at the beginning, how we got ourselves into this mess. My husband and I married in October of 2007. We began looking for our home before our wedding in hopes that we would have “our home” to go back to once we married. Previously, we had been living down by the university of Memphis in a rental. Our neighbors had purchased the home next us and they were slowly remodeling their own house. Our neighbor Perry, owned a construction company and his business did lots of remodels, so Perry knew he was capable of redoing his entire home. My husband and I spent lots of time with Perry and his wife, during some of that my husband would help Perry on few projects. It was just enough for my husband to know that he also could redo a few small minor projects himself. We spent months before we married looking for the perfect home. It doesn’t exist, in the price range we were looking. I betting most of you know how this feels. I recently read an article that said 42% of millennials wanted their first house to be their dream home, although we are considered Gen X, we are right on the edge of being a millennial and thought we would find the perfect house. News flash folks, especially all you millennials – that’s not real. Do yourself a favor and lower the bar, now.

Right out of college, having our first adult jobs, money was not raining down. We knew that we wanted to be in Germantown and that made the searching even harder. We decided that we could take on a fixer upper and make it our perfect home. We had a lot more time than money at that point in our lives, so our idea of the perfect home changed.

Right before we married we put an offer on a house, a very low offer. The home was awful. The home owners had never taken care of it. They thought they “could fix everything” (no joke, fixed a crack running down the middle of the glass pane of a window with gorilla glue) and the smell was something out of a nightmare. They had been taking care of their bed-ridden mother and had just let her wet herself in the bed over and over again. They only let us in the house to see it because my uncle, my real estate agent, knocked on the door and told her I was on the way. Her agent told us we were the only ones who had been let in. He himself, the selling agent, hadn’t even seen the inside.

We went for it with a very low offer. we knew that it was a long shot and went out of town for our wedding hoping for the best. we had looked at no less than 100 houses and this house had been the cutest potential of all the homes we had searched. My uncle called us once we got back and told us they had declined our offer. We were disappointed but my uncle told us instead of going back with a counter offer to hold off. this was the almost the end of 2007 and the housing market was slowly declining ( just pre-crash in fact) and the market overall wasn’t doing great. he told us the homeowners may call us back if they didn’t sell the house soon. We also knew the home was going to foreclosure soon so we sat back and waited. Three weeks later, the owner called us and sent a counter offer. We countered back and they accepted our final offer. We closed on the house the Friday before the bank was foreclosing on the upcoming Monday. to make this offer happen we had to jump through all kinds of hoops but that is a story for another day. And this is how my family got into this. A long shot, a house no one wanted, but with all the potential in the world. Two newly married kids stepping into a huge project, the likes of which we had never encountered, with a drill in one hand and YouTube in the other.

until next time, Christina