Suburbia Suburbia

OK!  So here it goes. I certainly do not have the same writing skills that my wife is able to produce, but this is half my story too so I though I should post once in awhile.

Suburbia! Suburbia!  As our house hunt started, I would identify homes in zip codes outside of our target area just to branch out a bit and to consider areas we might be able to afford a little more. My wife would always start to sing a little diddy she made up, “Suburbia Suburbia!”  As soon as I heard it I knew I better just turn the car around there was no chance in hell she was going to even consider a house that might cause her to have an 18 minute commute.  Even if it was set on a bucolic 3 acres overlooking a scenic river.

Choosing Pembrey was perfect because the house really did meet all the requirements from our checklist, but there are many other items that we could not have identified prior to a move.  Now that we are settled in we are recognizing why this was a great choice all around and are enjoying the community more and more each day.  So to name a few reasons see my list below:

1. Friendly neighbors who wave or stop to chat everyday.
2. A neighborhood welcoming committee who stops by with a housewarming gift.
3. Neighbors who already offer dog and babysitting services.
4. A walkable community with easy access to dog parks, playgrounds, and walking trails.
5. Being able to see the stars and enjoy the sounds of nature.
6. Two minutes to a library.
7. Local farm CSA within walking distance.
8. Having multiple choice for conveniences such as gas stations, banks, restaurants, and of course Dunkin’ Donuts (we now have two to chose from).
9. Pretty awesome local businesses all within minutes.
10. Easy access to school and work.
11. Still close to many friends.
12. Good public schools.
13. Enjoying watching birds, squirrels, and rabbits playing in the yard.

Here are a few images of our new community! Some provide us inspiration while others just are here to give you a sense of what its like.

And while we have already identified all that was on our list of must haves for the house, there are a lot of items we didn’t consider that have made this move so perfect.  We had a detailed plan to be out of boxes and semi organized so our family would feel better about settling into the home in a rather short time.  When we started stalking the house before and after our appointment with our realtor we were astonished by how friendly the community felt.  As you pass-by everyone waves and stops you to say hello.  Believe it or not that was not staged to get us to buy the house.  This community is actually that nice!

One way we know we’ve made the right choice is walking the dog each night.  Each neighbor stops to introduce themselves and engage in conversation about the community. We have come to discover this is a very dog friendly community which is huge for Finley and his daily walk.  The Pembrey community association Welcoming Committee has already stopped by with a beautiful plant.  During their visit we discussed various gatherings throughout the year and our annual meeting.

Needless to say, we’re feeling pretty much at home here in Pembrey. The boxes are unpacked and the to do list shrinks more every day.

They say you buy a house, not a neighborhood. In our case, I feel like we managed to do both!

This girl is on fire!

Until we’re ready to start showing off the current status of The Duckling, I figured I’d tease you a little with some of the small tweaks that I’ve been making around the house.

First, on a random Tuesday afternoon while I was still off from work for the move, I tackled my bathroom. And I say MY bathroom because it’s mine….all mine! We are blessed with two bathrooms in this house, and when we moved in, the decision was I get the one on the first floor that’s small, but updated, and the boys get the 1950’s vintage bathroom on the 2nd floor. Personally, I think it’s REALLY fair.

Ok, so back to MY bathroom. My mission? Get thee a toilet paper holder, add some bling, stop scaring the neighbors and make it more functional. The overall plan for this bathroom includes some dark gray paint on the walls and on the cheapo vanity (to make it less fugly until I can figure out what the space will allow). But until then, I needed to handle some basics.

First, a toilet paper holder. Since the walls are tile 3/4 of the way up, I wasn’t really up for the idea of drilling into tile. So the side of the vanity was calling my name. I marked the anchor, drilled two holes into the vanity and screwed the anchor in to the vanity….upside down (details people, details). So I unscrewed the anchor and installed it again upside right this time. Then put the holder in place and tightened the screw that would keep it squarely in place. Voila!

Here are some before, during and after shots.

Next I felt compelled to make the vanity look a little less cheapo by dressing her up a bit. What gal doesn’t love some bling? So bye-bye plain white knobs and hello gorgeous glass! Since the old ones easily unscrewed and the new ones easily screwed on, it was a piece of cake. And it makes a huge difference – until I take on the painting of the vanity!

One of the biggest challenges of this bathroom is the window – it’s tall and narrow. In other words, to give me some privacy (and to prevent any kind of traumatic TMI moment with our lovely new neighbors), my choices were limited. My immediate solution was to hang a towel over the window – functional but not exactly the long-term aesthetic I was going for. So I decided I could pay for some really expensive specialty install of wood blinds or a shutter, or I could go to Home Depot and pick up some semi-transparent film for the window that would give the appearance of frosting the glass without the “you can never go back” permanency of actually frosting the glass. I went the Home Depot route.

First, I had to cut the film to the right size, then clean the glass and then wet the glass so the film would stick, but not be so wet that I would end up dealing with Niagara Falls when I went to apply the film – no easy feat! I did finally get it up, got the bubbles out from under the glass and voila – privacy and light all in one!

My last task on this lovely Tuesday afternoon in late July was to make my bathroom more functional – in other words, one towel bar is not enough. So I found some lovely curvy hooks that would be perfect on which to drop my bath towels and bathrobe every day. This project raised the bar on my DIY skills as it required me to drill into the wall and to get the two hooks parallel to one another.

I marked the holes for the first hook using the anchor for the hook. I drilled, I put the drywall anchors in and then I screwed the anchor in place. I then placed the hook and tightened the screw and voila! Hook 1 was in place. Next I measured the distance from the top of the wall tile to the bottom of hook one and marked where the hook should go. I repeated the marking of the holes and started drilling – and whoops! – I hit a stud. Not what I wanted to have happen so I shifted over a half inch, drilled again and hit my mark. Then I installed the second hook like I did the first and was thrilled with the result. Both hooks were tight to the wall, solidly installed AND parallel.

At this point, I broke out into a lovely rendition of Alicia Keys’ “This Girls is on Fire!” – it was the perfect theme song for the moment and felt a lot more GirlPower-ish than say “I am woman hear me roar.”

With my bathroom tackled, I checked those items off my to do list and moved on. And I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my father for teaching me my excellent DIY skills and my lovely assistant Finley, who kept me company while I worked…

If only I could teach him to hand me my tools….

The negotiations.

I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “what is meant to be, will be” and in the case of our Ugly Duckling, it was definitely meant to be. I highlight this because if you had spent any time in our heads during the four weeks of negotiations with the seller, you would have thought to yourself, “RUN! Don’t walk. RUN!”

The short version of the story is that the seller has DPD or Difficult Personality Disorder (a term coined by my father that will likely live on for many years to come!). I’ll preface the long version of the story by clarifying that this isn’t Patrick’s or my first time at this house selling/buying rodeo. This is actually house #3 for each of us. So we know what to expect….at least we thought we knew what to expect.

The long version of the story goes something like this….

We make an offer.
We negotiate the final sale price with the seller via our realtor.
We do the home inspection.
We submit an addendum to the inspection.
We wait. And wait. And wait.
Seller finally replies with an addendum that is….bizarre. Bizarre wording, bizarre offer to do more than we asked, bizarre bizarre bizarre.
We ask for some clarification to his wording.
He suggests we meet at the house to go over everything (at which point my spidey senses are on alert – this transaction should be cordial but shouldn’t be personal or friendly…..and meeting at the house to discuss the addendum made it personal).
We meet at the house and from the handshake I know something is up.
Patrick and he go out to the garage to start discussing the addendum.
Our realtor and I are two minutes behind them and walk into a tense exchange.

What proceeds next is the seller suggesting that he should leave, our realtor then spending an hour talking him off the ledge and us spending an hour not sure if we’re actually going to get this house or not. Our realtor succeeds in bringing him off the ledge, but we’re still not sure where things will land.

I then call a friend who is good friends with the seller and ask if he’d be willing to talk to his friend and tell him that we’re good people, that we really want the house and that we’re sorry that things got off on the wrong foot. He agrees and this makes a world of difference. He is now forever known as “The House Whisperer.”

We spend the next two weeks doing a lot of CYA shipping legal docs over to make sure that we don’t lose the house. He ends up offering to pay for some of the work to be done on the house in advance of settlement. He ends up being mostly decent about things.

Most importantly, he ends up selling us the house. But when I tell you that this transaction will go down in the history books as “the worst house purchase EVER,” it’s no exaggeration. There was more than one occasion where we thought we were going to be starting our search from scratch. But we made it to the finish line…..or in the case of the Ugly Duckling, we made it to the starting line.

So the biggest disclaimer to this blog is that we weren’t really good at taking photos at critical moments. It’s a bit strange to be in the middle of the chaos of moving and say “WAIT! We need to photograph this for our blog!” So forgive us if we’re not exactly pros at this yet. That said, the before photos of Duckling are somewhat sparse. But these should give you a sense of what we saw when we looked at the house for the first time (and why we had to have a TON of vision to see beyond the ugly).

The search.

It was May 3, a beautiful spring day – picture perfect for house hunting. And if we actually were going to be taking our time with the search, we might have enjoyed the weather. But this was a house hunt to end all house hunts. We had 5 hours and we needed to see 10 houses. Oh yes, this was no marathon, this was a sprint!

The good news is that we had a vision of exactly what we wanted. The better news is that we were willing to be somewhat flexible, but weren’t willing to give away everything on our wish list. The list included:

• 3-4 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms minimum
• Family room or sunroom
• A turned 2-car garage (I’m not a big fan of looking at garage doors on the front of a house)
• One step out to the yard from the back door (rather than the 8 we had now)
• A big yard
• Buried in the neighborhood
• A quiet neighborhood
• And if we could find it, a Cape Cod.

We set out at 10 a.m. with our wish list in mind and saw two houses in a nearby neighborhood, still in the city limits of Wilmington, in the Brandywine Hills neighborhood. The first was much too small. The second was too much work, had a strange layout and we would have been dumping too much money into it to make it worthwhile.

The remaining houses were all outside the city limits and had a myriad of issues – too much work, strange layout, priced too high and therefore you wouldn’t get out of it what you put into it, too close to the highway and noisy, etc., etc. After a long day and a break for lunch (that thankfully saved me from getting cranky), we settled on three options.

When I describe these three options, I’m going to sound a bit like Goldilocks…forgive the analogy, but it can’t be helped. Sometimes you really know when something is “juuuust right.”

The first was in a good neighborhood, with the right public school feeder pattern, but was pretty much a total gut job and had a view of a water tower. It had potential, big potential. But with that potential came big dollar signs and no ability to live through the renovations.

The second, was also in a good neighborhood, not as good as the first neighborhood and not as great a feeder pattern for the public school system, but doable. It was also a total gut job – worse than the first. No way to live through the renovations and big dollars signs that would have been pricing us outside of the value of the neighborhood.

The last house, was in the perfect neighborhood – quiet and with very little street traffic as there’s only one way in and one way out of the neighborhood. It was a four bedroom, two bath Cape Cod. It was partially renovated (gorgeous kitchen, ok first floor bathroom, partially finished basement), but there was still plenty of room to put our stamp on things. It had the turned garage, it was buried in the neighborhood, it was 3/4 of an acre and it was one step out the back door to the yard, which would make it very accessible for family BBQs and for our son to enjoy.

Was it love at first sight? Not nearly. Why? Well, let’s just say that the guy living there was….picture Pig Pen times 10 and you’ll be close. There were leaves and trash in the sunroom, there was laundry laying all over the house, the floors hadn’t been vacuumed in forever, the upstairs bathroom was…..NASTY. There’s no other way to describe it! And the house had NO curb appeal whatsoever. The landscaping had all been ripped out, and there was no personality. Needless to say we were deflated.

Of all the houses we’d looked at online and in person, this was the one we wished the most for. We wanted it to be “the one.” And we walked around it seeing the ugliness of the tenant rather than the bones of the house and the quality of the few renovations that had been done.

More importantly, we were bummed because this house was in a neighborhood that we had actually been “stalking” for years. We’d drive through every now and then, wishing that something right would come on the market. We’d actually noticed when this house sold in 2010 and said then that it had a lot of potential.

So we ended the day confused. We got home and Patrick went out and mowed the lawn and I sat at the dining room table and made a pro/con list. An hour later Patrick came in and we both said “Pembrey” at the same time. It was one of those moments where we both just new that this one was “juuuuust right.”

Based on the list of cons above, you might wonder why. When I share with you our to do list, you’ll understand.

In the meantime, here’s a taste of why we’ve called this one “the Ugly Duckling.”

The listing.

When we decided to list our house, it was March 27. The plan was to spend the next six weeks working to get the house ready. This included cleaning out closets, emptying the basement, having the parging in the basement repaired, replacing windows where the thermal seal had broken and generally putting a shine on everything.

The to do list that Patrick put together was two pages – count ’em TWO. We started chipping away at it very quickly and before we knew it, we were well done half of the list. This was the middle of April. About that time our realtor, Cynthia, called to say that the market was really heating up, inventory was low and if we wanted to capitalize on this, we should list immediately. So we pushed up our listing date by two weeks and shot for Wednesday, April 24 for the house to land on the MLS. Our showings would start on Saturday, the open house would be Sunday and we’d be on our way!

On Wednesday night we started getting requests for showings. We pushed up the showing start date to Friday at noon. There were three showings that day, two on Saturday (one a repeat from Friday) and about 70 people (many nosey neighbors) who showed up on Sunday for the open house.

Tuesday night, April 30, Cynthia texted at 11 PM the following message “ding, ding, ding – we have a winner!” She had three offers, one that was a standout and would be meeting us the following evening to review and hopefully accept the offer.

If you’ve been keeping track, Tuesday was SIX DAYS from our house going into the MLS.

We met with Cynthia Wednesday night and immediately knew she was right – we had a winner! The only problem was….we had no where to go! The short story is that we found something – the detail of that will be forthcoming – and luckily our buyers were willing to let us rent back for a few months if we needed to. So not quite homeless, but certainly feeling the pressure to find a place and quickly.

Here’s a taste of what we’ve left behind….

And so it begins…

To be honest, it wasn’t long after we moved into our big stone colonial in 2006 that we started to think about what would be next. Why, you ask? Well, either we’re just real estate obsessed or we just knew it was time. But I think it’s also a bit that we chose a home that didn’t challenge us enough.

We fell in love with the house because all of the big stuff had been done (hallelujah, right?). All that we needed to do was some painting and a lot of landscaping – could we BE any more lucky? (read that with the Chandler Bing voice, of course!). Getting those little things done dramatically changed the house for the better, but it didn’t keep our attention long enough that we felt like we still had the opportunity to put our stamp on the place.

As 2013 began, it became more and more obvious that the time had come. In December we completed our last improvement – the addition of cabinetry around the refrigerator. For some reason the previous owners didn’t finish this off and it always felt a bit like the refrigerator just sat on that wall – a stark, hulking presence. Now it feels finished. See the before and after photos and you get what I mean!

But putting your house on the market is no small decision. Everything has to be considered! And in light of the real estate market’s plummet in 2008-2010, we weren’t so sure it was going to even be feasible to list the house. So we met with our realtor and the conversation went a bit like this:

Grays: We need to get at least “x” for the house? Do you think it’s possible?

Realtor: I do think it’s possible – it’s a great house, great location, it will show wonderfully. I think we should go for it!

Grays: Ok, if you think we can do it, we’ll go for it.

This was March 27.

On May 7 we accepted our offer. Oh yeah, you read that right.