In August of 2019, my wife Jess and I decided it was finally time to start looking for a larger house. We currently live in a 2 bedroom house, and having our 10 year old son and his 5 year old sister sharing a room just wasn’t a viable option anymore. So we made the financial decision to start looking for a modest home.
In the months that followed, there was a lot of hope and heartache. We would fall in live with a house only to have our offer rejected, or to have that house be totally out of our price range. In the end, we ended up finding almost the exact kind of house we were looking for.
Unlike I would say about 90% of the people out there looking for a new home, we did not want a new home. We wanted something historic, with a lot of character but with enough flaws that we could fix it up and make it our own. Back in January Jess found such a house on our almost hourly search on Realtor.com. When she first showed me the house that had just come onto the market I told her she was nuts since it was well out of our price range we had set. And yet as good wives tend to do, she talked me into seeing it. She texted our realtor and even he had misgivings since it was well outside of the price range we had given him for a new home. Nonetheless, we were in that house the next day giving it a look. It was an estate, which meant that the house was still filled with the previous owner’s possessions. After walking the property and house for about 45 minutes, we stood outside in the January cold and our realtor asked us what we thought. My exact words to him was, “this place intrigues me.” He asked if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I said good and that I wanted to put an offer in on the place. This was at 6pm on a Friday night, and on the second day it was on the market. Jess looked at me when I said those words and agreed with me. Our realtor said he had a really good feeling about this place and it seemed to be a fit for what we had been looking for. He told us he was going to back to his office immediately and get the paperwork started. I told him he could wait but he said he felt we needed to move quickly. So we parted ways and we took the kids out to dinner since we were about 30 minutes away from home. Before we even got our entrees, we got the paperwork for the official offer in our email and signed the paperwork over dinner. 48 hours later they seller came back with a counteroffer that we thought was a tad high considered our initial off, but after losing out on some previous houses we really like we decided to pull the trigger and pay the extra they wanted to try and close this deal. I’m not going to go into specifics, but there were a lot of hurdles along the way, including some major issues with the home inspection, issues with the estate, and countless delays of the closing date. But, on Thursday, March 19th, 2020 (the first day of spring), we finally closed on the house!
The property we bought is a .4 acre piece of land in the small historic community of Conyngham, Pa. We have a 2,500 sq. ft. farm house that was built in 1880. To the rear of the house stands the original summer kitchen, pretty much untouched since it was built in the 1800s. At the rear of the property is a 2 story barn from when it used to be a functioning farm. It was perfect. It was double the rooms we currently have, everyone gets their own bedroom, we have 2 1/2 bathrooms, a full stone stacked basement, and a walk up attic. The summer kitchen will eventually be turned into a stand alone music studio for Jess to tech private lessons, and the barn shall be my man cave to store all of my machinery, have a large office, and hold my arcade machines. The corner of the property butts against the community park that has everything you could want include in 3 pools. Main Street (which we live on) it full of historic houses and small little shops and restaurants. At night, there are old fashioned light posts that are lit up with white Christmas lights, giving the town the feel of a small beach town — a place we would love to retire to one day.
While the house needs a lot of work since not too much as been done to it since the early 80s, most of the historical aspects of the house have remained in tack including the interior glass doors, the original windows from 1880 with a locking mechanism I have never seen before, and the original 1 1/2 inch thick farm house floor boards, quietly hidden under 1980s carpeting. The house is a jewel in the rough, and as our realtor said, will quickly double in value once some small updating is done with it, including repairing it back to its original colors.
It’s been a long road and a VERY stressful few months, but we are now on our way to having a new home. We’re spending a few days there working on the house while living there, and a few days here packing and getting this house ready to rent.
If we ever had any doubt if all of this was worth it, hearing the kids marvel about how big the house is and their excitement exploring it the first night we spent there erased all of the stress that we endured to give our kids a better place to call home in a better neighborhood and school district from the one we currently live in. While we truly will miss most of the friendships we have made with our neighbors over the years, we are looking forward to the next adventure in our life.
** This post was not proof read as it’s almost 3am and I am in bed typing this before retiring to the house in about 10 hours to do more plumbing and electrical work. Sorry/not sorry. **
