Home Tour Series: Our New (Old) Home

Welcome to Modernly Matched and the first post in my Home Tour Series! I am beyond excited to share our home renovation journey with you and include all the crazy details that go into home renovations, so if you are planning one in the future you know what to expect!

Plus, I will share with you my outside the box tip and the reason we got this house amidst multiple (11!!) other bids on our house! So keep reading to the end and follow along with our home renovation journey!

With any home renovation, you have to have a contingency plan and anticipate some challenges, right?   Well let me tell you, we ran into a few doozies with our home renovations! haha. But after all, was said and done we are thrilled with our renovations to date and love how everything has come together!

Where it all started…..

Ok. So let’s go back to the beginning for a quick minute. What started off as casually dropping into an open house one Sunday afternoon, resulting in a big discussion about if we were in fact going to move, where we wanted to move and if we were going to buy an older house or build a new one. NOT easy decisions whatsoever!

Let me tell you. There are moments that test your marriage and I think the decision to buy or build was a big one in ours! haha. I think every day I was switching between buying or building while dragging Mikel to open houses and show homes every single weekend. Guys, nobody is perfect but my husband was pretty close to sainthood during those months of indecision.

Firstly, our biggest challenge was deciding WHERE we wanted to be. And that ultimately came down to larger property outside the city (what I thought I wanted) or inside the city closer to family. Ultimately, my family is my village so we decided to look closer to where we already were. The problem? There were only TWO streets I wanted to move to in our current area. TWO!

I’m not going to sugar coat it. There were multiple offers on multiple houses in multiple areas. All which fell through. All which thankfully WERE NOT the houses for us! Which we realized after when we weren’t all that disappointed when the offers didn’t go through.

Perseverance

Every Monday morning I scoured the new real estate listings and one particular Monday morning a house came up that was on one of the streets I had wanted to be on. Now, to put it into perspective, these were older houses built in the 1980s but many of the families were original owners. So if a house came up for sale it was few and far between!

I knew I loved this particular street because I grew up a street over! haha. While buying a house on the same street as my parents seemed a bit much, buying a house a street over seemed to be a reasonable distance away! I know, I know.  Not everyone’s cup of tea is to live a street away from their parents. But it was ok by us! Why wouldn’t we want our kids to be close to their grandparents? Hello, BABYSITTERS!!

I sent the listing to my husband and he called me immediately. His exact words were “We need to see this house today!” I called the agent and when we walked out the front door after seeing the house my husband looked at me and said “Do whatever you need to do to get this house. This is the house we have been waiting for.”

We wanted this house bad. Many people our age would have looked at this house and not given it a second glance. It was very dated inside, the exterior was brown and red brick and the complete opposite of the trendy white and grey new houses in the new areas. It would require a LOT of renovations that may take months to complete to bring it up to date. But it was EXACTLY the house for us! The perfect combo of both the houses we grew up in. It felt like home. Our home.

So we put in an offer and I swear we were never more scared. We got a call from the agent with a counteroffer and an explanation that there were multiple offers on our home. Many people wanted this house because of the location. We responded to the counteroffer and then……..the house was ours! We couldn’t believe it! I was so relieved I could cry. We found a home for our growing family that we loved, in a location we loved and we couldn’t be happier!

But wait, how did we get the house amidst multiple bids? What did we do differently to make our offer stand out from the rest? 

I will tell you! When my husband said to me “Do whatever you need to do to get the house”, I realized that we couldn’t be more serious about making this house ours. I knew the current owner was the original owner of the house. I knew she and her husband had raised their three kids there. I knew she was selling the house because her husband had recently passed and it was a very emotional time for her.

Closed on the deal

It was important I told her how we felt when we came through her house that day. That we could envision our family here, that we weren’t going to buy it and move a few years later. It wasn’t a home to renovate and flip for us. It was our future home to raise our growing family for many years to come.

So I wrote all of that in a letter. I even included a picture of our family. It was an unconventional move and I didn’t know either way if it would help us or not. But it was important for me to try and tell her, without seeing her in person, that this house already meant the world to us.

I included the letter with our offer and hoped for the best! Thankfully, we got the house!! And after the offer was accepted we went back to the house a few weeks later and got to meet her. She told me what it was like to read the letter with our offer and said she knew in her heart we loved this house as much as she did. And it was the reason she chooses our offer above all the others (including higher offers)!

I have tears writing this because I am so thankful for our house and where we live! There are many things we have done already and many more home renovation plans we have for this house! So if you love interior design, project management, and before and after transformation pictures, follow along with us on our journey!!

Which area of the house are you most interested to see? Kitchen? Living room? Master Bedroom? Comment below with your pick!

Cheers,
Tranda