Wednesday, January 22, 2014

An offer you can't refuse

So we sent our offer on the Feightly House last night.  My realtor, the wonderful Honia Gilbert, emailed me the paperwork.  Printed it, scanned it and emailed it back.

So, that's it?

I mean, shouldn't there be fireworks, intense Hans Zimmer music and maybe a guy in a body-harness suit suspended by a wire as he peers into a window to see if it's accepted?

The current owners had the house for sale briefly last December.  It came off again right away.  Kind of a teaser trailer for a movie.  Got us excited.  Actually, we got to walk through the house and it was weird.

Let me explain.  When we moved to Ohio in 2005, we came from the land of Victorians.  England.  We were stationed outside of Peterbourough, UK, while in the Air Force.  So when we came back to the States, we wanted an older house that we could renovate.  I mean, we had renovated the termite nest that was our house in Texas before we went to England, so doing another non-termite-infested house should be easy.  But it was 2005.  Prices were high in real estate (see financial catastrophe & housing bubble) and we just couldn't afford a fixer-upper in the area we wanted.


So we decided to build a house.  See the rest of this blog, beginning here.  

Now back to the recent past.  We walked through the Feightly House on a snowy, cold day.  Ever since we moved back to Ohio...actually since we bought the termite nest in Texas...I've been learning about what can go wrong with a structure.  Some might call me paranoid, others might think I'm OCD (obsessive construction disorder) but I say I'm prepared.  So when Linnea and I walked through houses, I took a flashlight and started in the basement.  Linnea notices the big picture, the layout of rooms, space for the family, that sort of stuff.  I notice plumbing, electrical, foundation, rot, termites (do I have a hangup with those things or what), weathersealing, roofs, termites.  Carpenter bees and carpenter ants (who, despite their names can't build anything that passes code) are also a no-no.

Walking through the Feightly House was different.  It's not that it's in great shape.  It needs a lot of work.  It's a huge house heated with radiators and a furnace that was new when my 21 year old was a toddler.  But it has potential.  That most magical of qualities that a house can have.

The layout, two houses connected together, means that we can grant the desire of my in-laws to have their own place, but they can just wheel down the hall to eat with us in the big dining room or the big kitchen.  Linnea can finally have an art studio, a sewing studio, a music studio and probably two or three more studios.  The potting wheel can be set up full time and probably even used!  I can have a photo studio.  The kids can have their own rooms without living in the basement (although, the boys seem to enjoy that).  Linnea and I both, independently decided that this house had potential.  It could be a contender.

So we're waiting on a reply from the sellers.  Hopefully hear more soon.

More to come.

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