We Buy a House

When Matt and I got married, I just moved into the house he had purchased a couple of years before we even started dating and we went to work on it. The house was really nice; it just needed some serious updating, and for the first year of our marriage we painted and rearranged things and it was great. When we decided we were ready to move we did a lot more, then placed the house on the market and sold it. I think that the pride we took in fixing up our first home together and then selling it took over a bit, and we started looking for something different. I am always on the lookout for “something different”. It’s probably genetic, but I tend to look at old houses and imagine what they could be if someone were willing to throw, oh, I don’t know, half a million dollars towards it. I grew up in a restored home and know how much fun it is (even amongst the work) to live in something that has a story. Don’t think for a second we picked up a Preservation NC house (but if you’d like to see them, they’re here and maybe you want one? http://www.presnc.org/. My mom and I laugh a lot when we get the catalog in the mail. You can buy a 3000 square foot house for something ridiculous like $30,000, but then you’ll need to move it and restore it. Of course we love the phrase “But it has great bones!” I think Matt is done with me saying that. Over the course of the last year, I have viewed about 75 properties, and Matt went into probably 40 or 50. It’s a lot of housing. We considered purchasing a downtown 1905 home that needed a total gut and remodel but then realized if we did we would become “The Money Pit” couple. Which reminds me, we need to watch that movie soon. Needless to say when I brought my dad along to view it, he shook his head pretty much the entire time. Raleigh has a ton of houses built in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s up for grabs. In the city limits, it’s split level heaven. Split levels are strange. They were built to be affordable options for families who needed space but didn’t have the cash to pay for extra square footage. They are literally layered levels that contain strange nooks and crannies for storage, oddly designed floor plans, and walking into one you definitely have the feeling you have stepped into an episode of “The Brady Bunch”. Almost always a good amount of their square footage is tucked into strange nooks and crannies. Split Levels were, in the 90s and early 2000s at least, considered kind of taboo. When we began working with our realtor and I mentioned a split level we had already looked at, she just shook her head and said they were always hard to sell. You are going to be spending time in your basement, and there never seems to be a bathroom on the same floor as the living room, kitchen, and dining room. So we kept moving but because of the neighborhoods we were interested in ran across more and more of them. Some of them were already beautifully remodeled, some of them poorly remodeled, and many of them reminded us of the era in which they were constructed. I’m really impressed that people chose combinations of burgundy shag carpet and pink walls, or elected to put down astroturf in their family rooms. Often when you walk into the front door of a split level (this could also refer to a “raised ranch” or “split foyer” style), you have to go up or down stairs to get anywhere. So you can’t walk into an actual living room or kitchen or even office. You stand at the bottom or top of a staircase, depending on design, then make your choice about where to go. It’s not a terrible thing, I guess, but I think it’s really important to have a welcoming entrance, if not for guests, then for yourself. So we kept on looking and looked at really strange houses and weirder design decisions and began to seriously consider just moving away from the neighborhoods we loved to get a more traditional or modern floorplan. Back in the late fall, we looked at one house in a neighborhood we loved. It was an empty split level (the woman who lived there had moved to a retirement community after the death of her husband) and had a ton of space. Not necessarily well used space, but space. When you walked into the front door of the house, you walked into a real foyer that could hold actual people and contained (go ahead, gasp now), a coat closet. Seriously. I immediately liked this feature, but was still a skeptic. Also from the foyer, you could walk straight into the family room, or another room. Two options on the same level as the door. This was something new compared to most of the split levels we had been looking at. Going upstairs you had the main living space, and a level above that were the bedrooms. But they weren’t unreasonable stairs. One house we looked at you literally felt like you were walking into a dungeon it was so far down. Then we saw the kitchen. Of course we had looked at pictures online but until you really see it you don’t realize how crazy it is. The person who lived there before us really like blue checks and gingham, and used them everywhere in her kitchen, including on the ceiling. So immediately we knew it was a massive renovation project. The kitchen clearly had not been updated in several decades, and I’m pretty sure they were not using a full size refrigerator in there. The bathrooms weren’t much better, the yard was an absolute mess, and there were too many cosmetic issues to count. But there were beautiful hardwood floors and windows, a big yard if it could ever be brought under control (English Ivy is one of the hardiest and worst plants known to mankind, in my opinion), and space for a little one. "I love it." I said. "What?" said Matt and the realtor. "It's got good bones. I like it." Fast forward a few months, and the place is ours. It's got a lot of "potential" and it "could be beautiful with some work". So now, Matt is on the floor with a catalog of cabinet fronts, and I'm watching the baby move around and wondering what I was thinking. I know what I was thinking at the time- "We can do this!" but now I'm wondering if I was thinking that because it was true, or if I was thinking that because it was around the same time I had finished my morning coffee. The idea for writing about it came from, first and foremost, my inability NOT to write about things going on, but also because there just wasn't a ton of information out there about modernizing split levels. And there are lots of split levels being modernized, at least around here. So we're publicizing our project and putting it out there. And hoping for feedback, for people who are going through the same process, and maybe for people to get ideas about what can happen in a house that needs to be rewired, replumbed, re.........nnnnooooovvvaaatttteeedddd. Be on the lookout for pictures (I just thought it was past time for a new post).