Another year in between posts and I’m back again to share the belated news of our “new” home purchase! I figured it was high-time to make a formal introduction to the home and fill you in on what prompted the move before I dive into blog posts about the house itself.
Sometimes when you write something down and send it out into the universe, things start moving in ways you never anticipated. In my March 2018 post I walked through our various options for improving our little rambler house that we bought in 2017. I discussed doing nothing and saving our money, renovating within the existing footprint of our house, and putting a master bedroom addition on the house. The last line of the post read:
“In the meantime, I’ll continue monitoring the local real estate market for a manageable fixer upper with views of the Potomac in a decent school district…”
It turns out that fixer upper would be found sooner than later. We closed on it in May and we are SO HAPPY to be in our “forever” house! We also still have SO MUCH PAINTING to do. In August we closed on the house we lived in for a lone year after another scramble to get it in better condition for sale.
Three houses in three years seems pretty crazy, so let me walk you through our rationale:
Were we planning to move? Not yet. But we were open to the possibility. It was always our intention to move to our long-term house with the emphasis on the house instead of timing. I never wanted us to be in a position where we felt desperate for more space and settled for something that would work but didn’t excite us. Our “dream house” was on .5+ acres, had river views, and was located in our current community. The emphasis there is dream, as houses meeting that description generally go for $900k+ on the low end. There’s plenty of $2mil+ houses available to meet that description, but the affordable ones don’t have much turnover. We were comfortable with the idea that we would be in our starter home 2.0 for a while in order to save, grow our incomes, and buy the house we wanted for the long haul.
Then a fixer-upper came on the market in late April at a price that you don’t generally associate with (seasonal) views of the Potomac. It wasn’t huge but certainly big enough to grow into, it was in need of some major cosmetic updates, and the floor plan had some wonkyness. Despite all that, I could tell immediately that it had been meticulously maintained by the previous owners. The shell of the house and its systems were in excellent condition. We’re talking new roof, new zoned boiler (boilers often last 50 years), basement water management system (excellent since our area is a swamp), upgraded windows, a generator, etc. Given its cosmetic condition and square footage, the house itself didn’t seem to justify the asking price, so we put in a low offer and came VERY close to losing out and walking away. The day we went under contract was a roller coaster, with the competing buyers increasing their offer beyond ours and wiping out some of their conditions. By some stroke of luck we still got the house. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, your realtor and her/his relationships can really make or break you.
Do we regret selling our first house in 2017? Sometimes I do but only because I would love to have an income property. When I think about Amazon HQ2 coming to “National Landing” I wince a little because our old house is nearly walking distance from that location–something we knew was a possibility when we sold. But we would not have had the cash to buy our new house if we still had our old house, even with the extra money we would have saved. Housing prices in our old neighborhood didn’t seem to come quite as high last spring as they did the year we sold so I’m not confident we would’ve gotten as much out if we had sold it last year instead. We also probably would’ve spent more money on a substantial a kitchen renovation instead of the quick cosmetic updates we did to put it on the market. When I consider those other factors I don’t really see us in this new house had we not sold last year so I’m happy that we did.
What are your long-term plans for the house? That will be answered in another post down the road, but we are toying with the idea of an addition that would give us three true bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, as well as a kitchen/dining/living area that takes better advantage of the area in our house that gets the best light and best yard/river views–the main reason we bought the house. I’ve measured the whole house and started trying to figure out what’s possible. We don’t see doing an addition for a few years, so most of what we are tackling right now is cosmetic to make each room feel clean and pulled together.