Well, I have another announcement. Last week I shared
our baby news and earlier this week I shared the
video "after" tour of our 90's fixer upper! But I have some more big news for you today.
We're selling the
Stanley 90's Reno. This was not our original intent. We did NOT mean to renovate and then flip this house when we bought it a year ago. We figured it'd be a 5-year house, maybe more, just needed to see what happens with Jason's career and our family.
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| Listing photo of the exterior! |
(See all the listing photos and before/after here.)
But in June, right as we were saying, "MAN, it will be great to be done with projects soon and live in a finished house!," we had dinner with my parents who told us a neighbor in their historic downtown neighborhood was cleaning out his family home to sell. I walked by that home in my childhood and had been in there once, and knew the family and their kids about my age. Nice people, beautiful 1930's Tudor home, fabulous neighborhood--1.5 blocks from my parents.
We felt a spark. We were talking about starting our family back then and how fabulous would it be to be so close to my parents?! It's farther from work, but we'd loved living there for a month when we first started projects over at our current home and the neighborhood over there is SO much better. We might be able to really establish roots and stay there a long time! Something we'd never had plans for or a concept of before with our first two homes, which felt a little temporary.
The next weekend, we went into the toy store this family owns and chatted with the homeowner. We set up a time to tour the house and were so excited!
The house was fabulous. Very traditional layout (no knocking down walls in this one), but lots of quality original details like coved ceilings in the living and dining, original wood trim (the previous owners stripped the [probably lead-based] paint and restored it), original oak floors, built-ins in the charming breakfast nook off the kitchen in a turret.
For the past several months we've been communicating with the owner, who has to get 30 years of family memories out of the house before selling. He hasn't been in a hurry and had two other couples interested (all neighborhood word of mouth). Also, as the market picked up this summer, the Redfin and Zillow estimates for the market value of the home went up more than $100k and while those aren't always realistic, that kind of change isn't completely meaningless--we weren't sure if we'd be able to afford it.
Long story. I want to tell you more about it later if it works out. We've been in limbo about this house since June but the daydreaming made us realize,
we want to live in that neighborhood regardless. We want to be that close to my parents, in an older home in a walkable, connected neighborhood. Homes don't go for sale there very often, but we wanted to be ready.
Keeping our fingers tightly crossed that the Tudor home would work out, without an agreement with the seller, we decided to
list our home while the leaves are still on the trees and the weather's still nice. It went on the market last week, we had an open house over the weekend, and we had lots of showings. Also, it turns out the market has
not slowed down after the summer as we feared, and our home's value has actually gone up a little! (I was worried about not getting it on the market before school started.)
We accepted an offer and if all goes well, will close and move in about 5 weeks.
We're still trying to work things out with the Tudor homeowner, but if he does choose us and we're able to buy his home, it won't be ready till at least February. So we'll be living with my parents again (we did that last fall when working on our fixer upper). If it doesn't work out, we'll be house-hunting in that very desirable neighborhood, so fingers crossed for that, too.
We're in limbo and can't wait to figure out what's next for us--but here's to the next thing and hoping it's fabulous!
Thank you for following along as we've updated the
Stanley 90's Reno and thanks for your support in all of our life changes!
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