OUT WITH THE NEW AND IN WITH THE OLD… HOUSE THAT IS
Introduction
There are many changes that we go through in life that force us to grow. At some point, you think “this”, again? One of the hardest upheavals I’ve felt is my recent retirement and seeing the last of our brood leave the proverbial nest. Truthfully, both my husband, Dan, and I feel a little lost and untethered. There is something to be said about the freedom of coming and going as we please, enjoying travel and date nights. And I’m enjoying new work part-time and taking classes while Dan continues to work at a job he loves until he is ready to retire too. But something is missing.
So, one of the ways we thought we could ground ourselves again is to find a new family home. A home that is functional for two people but could fit our 5 grown kids and their future families. Renovating a historical home wasn’t on our radar, but here we are excited for the challenge.
Although buying a house isn’t new to us, buying a home together is. Dan and I were both single parents when we met and married 13 years ago, and we raised our kids in his home to minimize disruption. Our previous home was large enough so all the kids had their own space and could remain in their respective schools. This was important because all of them lived with us full-time. In 2021, when the youngest was graduating high school and before interest rates started to rise, we sold our home and moved into a brand-new rental row home that is walkable to shopping and restaurants. We like the walkability, but we hate the limited parking and lack of our own outdoor space. The worst part is that we couldn’t fit the family comfortably.
Where, What, and Why
Dan grew up in Missouri and I grew up here in Pennsylvania. Our kids are dispersed between 4 states, Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, and Hawaii. Both of our parents are still alive and well. Dan still travels for work and can work remotely but he needs to be near a large airport. Neither one of us likes the cold but we enjoy seasons. We made a Covid pandemic condominium purchase in 2020 on a beach in Florida as an investment and a place to relax so we already had somewhere to escape in rough winters. So, where the heck do we go? Google.
I googled “best places to retire”, “best walkable towns”, “best places to live in the US”, “best states for the cost of living”, and “best airports”. You name it, I googled it. Eventually, we settled on Charlotte, NC and I switched from Google to Zillow. Keep in mind we have never been to Charlotte except inside the airport, but the location was great on paper, central to most of the kids, and had the amenities we liked. At night, when sitting in front of some Netflix show we would search for homes and determine what we liked and what we didn’t like (it was me on the computer showing him what I like and getting a thumbs up or thumbs down). If you watch House Hunters on HGTV and see a couple on two different pages that was us! He wanted a large stately home on lots of land. I wanted a smaller fixer-upper to make our own with a small yard and garden. We both agreed that we wanted a place where our family would love to visit. We researched for almost 2 years.
So, getting ahead of ourselves, we planned to rent a home for a week on Lake Wylie to celebrate Christmas in 2023. That way we could spend some time in the area to make sure this is what we wanted. Armed with a general idea of where we wanted to be in the Charlotte area, we planned a separate weekend trip months ahead of Christmas to explore, meet with a realtor, and look at real estate. We bid on a home that we loved and it fell through. I won’t go into details, but the listing realtor already had a client lined up and did some shady dealing to make sure she received sole commission. We kept looking but ran into many porridge-too-cold and porridge-too-hot scenarios.
We continued our search. Christmas arrived and we were having an amazing time in the rental home. But there was a big BUT, nothing felt right. Dan was the first to admit it and opened the conversation. Here we were moving away from our work, our friends, our favorite places, and my parents (who are in their late 80’s) for something unknown because it was good on paper. WHY? We had no idea. We wanted to be closer to our kids but we realized they had their own lives and we weren’t going to be any closer to them physically.
Being adaptable and being able to pivot was our superpower. We quickly contacted our realtor who sold our home in PA and said “Surprise!” we are staying. Can you find us a house before our lease runs out?
No PRESH ure
We felt a sense of relief that we realized moving away wasn’t the right decision, but we didn’t have a lot of time for that decision to settle before we had to seriously start looking for a place to live. Thank goodness we knew Rebecca Diamond, our realtor, for many years and she was familiar with our family and previous home. As many of you know, looking for a home in this real estate environment isn’t easy. We also continued to look at Zillow because why not?
We are fortunate because we have spent many years working and saving. We also had the money from the sale of our previous home that went into our savings. If we stayed within a certain budget, we could pay cash and avoid a mortgage for a certain period while we waited for the rates to go down. We could also live in the condo in Florida until we found a place to settle. Not everyone has these choices when looking for a home.
Every house we looked at had something we liked but didn’t give us a feeling of home. We continued to look, tour, and attend open houses and, one evening we saw a house online that looked so different and had so much history to it that we called Rebecca and asked to see it even though it was a bit above our price range. Because we were looking during winter in Pennsylvania, we experienced a few cancellations. The family didn’t want to show the house because of the ice and snow. It looked as if this home wasn’t going to work out either. A few weeks later, the bad weather abated, and we had our first look.
The house needed A LOT of work. I mean a lot a lot of work. The roof was 112 years old, some of the pipes in the garage/basement area were wrapped in asbestos, none of the bathrooms or the kitchen had been touched, and there was a smell (not horrible but an old smell). The house had not been lived in for about 4 years and was listed for sale for two years. Highlights? Original hearted pine wood throughout, 5+ bedrooms, lush landscaping with a creek in the back, and a greenhouse! Something we could make our own but at what cost?
Dan did NOT want this kind of fixer-upper at all. The house had me at hello (it was the large wisteria out front that got me). While we were touring the home and I was talking to the realtor, Dan decided to take a second look around. I knew he saw something special too. We went home, talked, did our usual pro-con list, and researched an architect. Rebecca sent us a name too. Fred Bissinger. We contacted him right away to schedule a walk-through and to understand what we were getting into.
We chose Fred for 2 reasons: He was familiar with William L. Price and specialized in early 20th-century architecture. He is a lovely kind gentleman who assured us that we could maintain the history of the home and bring it into the 21st century lifestyle. More than that he was excited to handhold us through the process if the home became ours. This wouldn’t be easy. The home was in the family for generations and there was a tremendous amount of emotional attachment to the home. There had been 12 families interested in the property, and multiple offers, all of them rejected. The current owners weren’t money-motivated, they just didn’t like the people who bid on the home.
Will We or Won’t We
Based on the information we had we came in with an offer and it was low… or at least much lower than the asking price. We didn’t do this to insult the family. We knew the value of the location, the home, and the history but we also had to be practical about our finances, a renovation, and not pricing the home out of the market. We also had to go into this offer with a business mindset and not an emotional one. If it wasn’t meant to be something else would work out… eventually. They countered with an offer, and we agreed on a final amount. There was only one unsettling moment because we wouldn’t pass on inspection although that appears to be the trend in home buying. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, at the suggestion of a friend, if they didn’t accept our final offer… so here we are! No one was more surprised than us.
Since settlement a few weeks ago we have been developing plans with the architect and interviewing contractors, and designers. This is just the first step of many that I will write about so we can share what we learn and document our family history in this new magical place. Oh, the name of our house? The Butterfly House… how fitting that the name of the house suits the change we are going through in life.