20 January 2014

History of a House + a New Family

You know the creepy stories you hear about some houses?  Yeah... I don't like those.  I hate them.  I will run out of the room singing "lalala" so I don't have to hear them. 

So when it came to looking for our house, I really would have loved to buy a freshly built home & be the only ones to ever live in it.  Voila-- no creepy stories!

But with our budget & the area where we live, it was a ridiculous notion.  So we went forward with house hunting, hoping for the best.  If you've ever been house hunting for a middle to lower class home then you know how completely creepy some can be.  Funky smells, odd stains on the walls, missing pieces of carpet...  there are some seriously odd things you will see!

If I had written a list of things I'd want for a home, it would have looked something like this:
1) Know the complete history of the home.
2) Be built like my dad would build something.
3) Not have irregular additions built on (I'm looking at you, flat roofs, carpeted garages & laundry chutes in the living room).
4) Fully fenced in backyard.
5) Needing nothing more than a coat of paint (or freshly painted with gorgeous colors).
6) Nothing weird or awkward.
7) Curb appeal.
8) To have a garage, but not a huge one where the house is hidden behind it & you can barely find the front door.

And that's why I stopped in the middle of the living room one day.  I'd taken no more than 7 steps into a home & yelled for Josh who had arrived ahead of me.  This was it.  I was standing in my living room.

Me: (yelling into the next room) When can we put in an offer?
Josh: Let's look at the rest of the house first, ok?
Me: Ok!

Look, look, look, look.  Yep.  It was our home.  We put in an offer the next day, moved in six weeks later. #2-#8 had all been fulfilled.  We figured #1 was a lost cause anyway, but considered it okay because the home had a generally happy feel to it.

During the buying process, my husband Josh got a Facebook message from the seller's wife.  She explained who she was & that she was excited to see that the home was going to a young Christian family.  Her husband had grown up in the home & it meant a lot to them.  It was a happy place full of happy memories.  Josh forwarded the message to me & I pulled off the side of the road to read it right then.  I had to catch my breath.  Everything that I had wanted in a house came true, just in a different way than I had imagined.


Since then I've learned a lot not only about the house history, but also about the family that lived here.  Everyone speaks so highly of the family.  We even got to hear about the parents love story!  It was so sweet-- I can only hope to bring so much joy into this home.  I love being able to ask what a certain light switch connects to, or what the original bathroom looked like.  This is truly a dream come true!

We had the sellers over for dinner last week and as they were leaving we asked what it was like to be back at the old house and to see it decorated differently.  The husband smiled & said, "it feels like home, and you feel like family."

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