It’s been a very long time since we’ve gotten to go on a journey here on the blog. And by journey I really mean settling in for a good story. Maybe even something with multiple parts. Well Friends, I’ve got a good one for you!
In order to get to the good stuff I first need to back up and give you some back story for context. When we moved from Haiti we spent about a month living with Chris’ parents, then moved into one of the rental houses that they own. Now we’re here, living the American life, paying rent and utilities and just figuring out future plans. When we had planned to be in Haiti until we retired, we had a lot of ideas about what retirement could look like. After we moved here waaaayyyy before that was supposed to happen, we realized we needed to start making different plans.
Over the past 6-7 months we had more and more conversations about housing and what we wanted to do. We knew that in the next year or so we wanted to buy a house, but weren’t in a rush. I’m always thinking about things like home renovations, and if you’ve been around here for a long time, you know that I was very hands on with the build of our house in Haiti. I also like looking at real estate listings for fun, so I had been watching the local market since we arrived. It was incredibly slow over the winter, and most of what was available was out of our price range for what we needed. It was a little bit crazy, if I’m honest.
As we talked more and more about buying a house, we started making lists of things that were important to us. It was things like it would need to have three bedrooms. We wanted it to be in our kids school boundaries so we didn’t have to drive or figure out different transportation than the in bounds bus routes. We like the part of town we are currently in and would prefer to stay here because it’s not only close to all of the things we enjoy doing, but it’s also the part of town where family are and we’d like to be as close as possible. We need some kind of work space because Chris and I are both working from home, even if that meant a corner in the bedroom where one of us can have a desk, or something like that. We needed space to park several vehicles and also wanted some covered parking if possible for Chris’ VW van (it’s a ’69, so it needs to be under cover during the really wet months), and we’d love a decent sized yard so we can have fruit trees and a garden and/or flower beds. If we had the possibility of putting in a rental unit so we can use that rent to help off-set some of the mortgage, we’d like to do that because that’s just smart. And, one of our wants, if possible, was to end up in a house that was older with some character that we could put our own stamp on. We don’t need polished and shiny and new. We want something that we can make ours.
It’s a long list, and we knew that there would be something we’d have to compromise on, because there always is. We reminded ourselves of that as spring came and we were seeing the market start to move more. Things started coming up, and then they would be gone. Chris loves data and found out that the average days on market was about 10. We knew one of the big compromises would probably be the location. The part of town that we’re living in is very desirable because it’s minutes away from the downtown core of Vancouver. In the past 20 years the city has been working to revitalize downtown. We have a fabulous city park, an amazing farmers market on the weekends, and tons of little restaurants, coffee shops and pubs. The biggest thing is that the downtown area is right along the Columbia river, and the city has been working on a waterfront development that not only includes apartments and businesses, but a beautiful community walking and park area that is now spanning a good part of the city river frontage on both sides of the I-5 bridge. Houses in this area are often older homes, many from the early to mid 1900’s, and even the smallest ones go for way more than you would think they should. If you can find one that’s more run down and fix it up your property value can literally go up by several hundred thousand. The likelihood of finding something in this area that was in our price range was very, very minimal.
Back in May a house came up that peaked our interest, but we weren’t pre-qualified for a mortgage yet so it wasn’t an option – but it did push us in the right direction. We realized that if we wanted to be able to jump on something like that when it came up, we needed to talk to our mortgage broker and see if we could get pre-qualified. We did, and spent a couple weeks moving documents around and all that fun stuff, and did in fact get the go ahead.
So here we were, going from a place of thinking about buying a house as a “down the road, sometime next year” thing, to being in a position where we could actually do it if the right place came along. We connected with our realtors, who are family friends and took on all of Chris’ parent’s clients when they retired. We knew we were in good hands :) They encouraged us to start looking at a few places with them so we could all talk through what we liked and didn’t like, to give them a better feel for what we were looking for, and for us to hone in on that more ourselves.
We looked at a few houses within a few days, and all of them were a hard pass, but we did start seeing more of what was in line with our needs and wants, and some of the things where we could be more flexible. We weren’t in a position where we HAD to move, so we knew we could take our time and just keep looking for the right place. This was all happening the first full week of June.
On June 10 (I promise timeline matters here) I saw a house pop up that got my attention. It was an old craftsman style built in 1918 and just minutes away from where we currently live in a neighborhood full of old houses from the early days of the city. Most have been fixed up, and when they have been, they’ve gone up in value by anywhere from $150,000-400,000 depending on size and condition. The house was very much needing work, but Chris and I are up for that and prefer it because it helps make it our own, so we were open to a fixer upper. I thought there might be the possibility of putting in a rental unit in the basement because there’s an outside entrance. We decided to go look at it.
Friends, I think the best way to describe this house is to share the conversation I had with my brother right after I sent him the listing link…
Me: Sends link. A little while later my phone rings and I see it’s my brother, Darren.
Me, answering phone: “Hi!”
My brother, not even saying hello: “Listen, I’m just going to say the thing that no-one else wants to say to you right now. That, is the horror house. You know that someone beat their wife and she died in the basement and no one has told you about it yet. That is the only way to describe that house.”
I was crying with laughter and hardly able to breathe because he wasn’t wrong. About the condition of the house, not the dead wife part. I have no idea if someone ever died in the house, because as I’ve learned in the past couple of months, they don’t actually have to disclose that information to a prospective buyer…
She doesn’t look terrible, just kind of tired, right? But the character! So much potential! I want to mention that these are the listing photos, and we all know that those are often much nicer than the actual house…
Okay, it’s a little rough, but the original wood! The original door! The picture rails… I knew we could fix/restore wood stuff, even if it meant we had to paint all of it. That would be sad, but not the end of the world.
Can we please talk about those original built ins?!? I just wanted the house because of those. Done and stick a fork in me. The windows all needed to be replaced and the roof was in bad shape. We were starting to hear too many dollar signs but knew that roofing could be a bargaining tool. It was in the part of town we wanted and we knew had the potential to be something good, but it was also fronted on one of the busy through roads and we just kept hearing traffic the whole time we were there. Maybe not a deal breaker, but stuff to consider. We kept going and went to check out the basement to see what the possibilities were.
There was A LOT going on down here…
The only reason that Chris agreed to even go look at this place was because of the potential to put a rental in the basement, but when we got down there…
Listen, these photos lie. They must have had a big light down there when they took them because that little lightbulb was not big enough to make things this bright. It was dark and damp and dirty. Initially, just looking at the pictures we thought maybe it was just a case of needing to be cleaned really well, maybe some paint. But then we kept looking around. It did desperately need to be cleaned, but beyond that the foundation was seeping water. As in there was a fan on and pointing to a wall because it was cracked and there was moisture trickling in. The amount of work that the house needed in general may have been manageable, but not the foundation.
It was so much to think about and process that we actually came home from seeing the house and Chris was almost having a panic attack, questioning our decision to even be looking at a house in the first place. I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. There was a lot of pacing and twitching. He actually just peeked over my shoulder while I was typing this, and when he saw the pictures it *may* have caused a mock wretching sound to depart from his lips. I grew up in a family that did a lot of DIY projects around the house, and in fact gutted the house I grew up in at one point and redid the whole thing, so renovations and building projects don’t scare me. Chris didn’t grow up with that and as he says to people, “I don’t do wood, my wife is the one with the power tools.” When we built our house in Camp Marie, I was the one that did the initial floor plans, then he worked with an engineer friend to do the structural designs, and he oversaw the structural build, but all the finishing stuff was me, even down to building all of our cabinets, closets, countertops, vanities, etc.
All of that to say that I think I was more willing than Chris to take things on, but even I knew my limitations and that we just didn’t have the ability or money to commit to something like this, no matter how much we loved the overall idea of it.
It was so overwhelming to think about what we could afford and the amount of work that might need to go into a place in that price point that we actually decided to step back and stop looking, just taking a bit of a breather and taking the pressure off of ourselves. We knew we weren’t in a rush and we needed to not give in the the FOMO (fear of missing out) or worry that we would miss the right house for us. I fully trusted that when the time was right and the right house came along, we would know and we would have a lot of peace about it, not a panic attack, and things would fall into place, so we stepped back. One of the good things that came out of looking at this particular house was that Chris had always been the one to see the really run down house looking like it was about to fall over and say, “There! That’s the kind of house we need. The one that you get really cheap and then fix up yourself.” I would try to remind him that you might pay way less on the front end, but you were going to pay waaaaaaayyyy more to even make it livable. With this house, he finally got to see what that actually means and realized that while he liked the idea of it, he wasn’t up for it physically, mentally, or financially. It helped us more clearly define what we could and were willing to do on a house, and what we knew we weren’t.
That was Sunday, June 11. We spent the next couple of days mulling over life, and talking about how we needed to just go slow and not rush ourselves, put on the brakes, and even stop looking.
Y’all (go ahead Canadians and mock me, I don’t care), this is where things get interesting. But, you’re going to have to wait to hear the rest of the story :)
~Leslie
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