Out with the old

It’s been a crazy year looking for our house, we put an offer on a house in March and it fell through. My heart broke because I had mentally moved in and it was a great lakefront property – unheard of in our area! I saw myself buying a pontoon and living happily ever after fixing up a ranch style house. It needed some work, but that’s what young couples do, right? Thank goodness it fell through. Kent and I enjoy the basics but are terrible at the DIY projects around the house. It’s not that we don’t want to be creative, it’s just that it’s a lot of work and we are really not that creative or handy. When the house fell through I thought we’d never find something in comparison. Every house we looked at couldn’t compare. I was crushed. Plus the Michigan weather this spring sucked! There was rain and snow, then craziness that was April and May showers – has it ever rained like that! On one of our Sunday drives, Kent and I checked out a little neighborhood in the greater Lansing area. We found a ranch house that was built by the builder we love and the price was right. It was in the new part of the neighborhood and was one of the few houses build at that end. We lucked out when we drove by and saw that it had an open house. We walked in and really liked the house. It was a ranch with two bedrooms and the potential for two more in the basement. A house we could grow into. But life has it’s way of laughing in your face and holding out for something better. As we talked to one of the architects we learned that the house one street over was also just listed and was a killer price. We had to check it out. We did and it was nice, but we didn’t fall in love. We were pretty set on the ranch. One week later, we went back to the ranch for a second look. We weren’t convinced, the honeymoon had worn off and we really didn’t like that it only had two bedrooms and that it was expensive for a two bedroom house that had been on the market for almost 5 years! Crazy right! We decided to take another look at the second house and fell in love. For me, I realized that we had an amazing house in the neighbor hood we wanted to be in for a killer deal. For Kent, it was the built in speakers both inside and out that were playing when we walked in that sealed the deal. We made an offer, after one day we heard back with a counter, we accepted and that was that! We had signed in less than 24 hours! We scheduled our inspection and were well on our way to owning our new house.

The inspection went well, only one qualm, the radon was high and we needed a mitigation system put in to take care of it. One quick addendum and the sellers were going to put it in. Only one more thing, we now had to wait for their kids to finish school before we could move. It was a long wait but we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. What a crazy few months. I can’t imagine getting the house on the lake now, it seems like such a blessing to be moving into our dream house.