I have never been one to do things the easy way. Thats a fact.

So it makes sense in the middle of a sellers market, a world wide pandemic, and an economy on the brink od collapse I would decide it’s time to buy a house.

Now we decided that we wanted to avoid getting a loan if at all possible. Which means paying cash, which we don’t have a ton of. So it was clear we were going to be buying a “fixer upper”.

I had some friends that had bought a house really cheap, and had worked with a real estate agent known for helping people get into homes cheap, quick, and with cash offers.

In our first meeting I said “We are dumpster diving for houses. But we want the stuff at the top of the dumpster that is salvageable, not the stuff at the bottom of the dumpster that you would have to get covered in garbage to get to.”

She paused for a moment and said “OK, well the good thing about that is that is 85% of people wouldn’t even go to look at a home like that, so that in your favor.” I decided then and their that I really liked our real estate agent.

And so the search began. There was the house on the corner of a four way intersection (which was when I found out you cant have a fence in front of a house in the county we were looking in), Their was the house with the carpet in the kitchen and bathroom, their was the house with 13 animals and smelled like a stright up butt hole, or the house where the backyard was the width of the house and every 30 seconds I had to tell my kids they were on the neighbors property.

And then we sent a listing to our agent. It said it was a 7 bedroom but only 2 were pictured. “You don’t want to look at that place” she said “it’s clearly a dump”.

To which I responded “Yeah, but don’t you want to know what their hiding?”

So we went, and wat they were hiding was the fact that the houses needed to be totally ripped out to the studs and rebuilt. The roof that they advertised as having been replaced the month before was because it had leaked and the house was filled with mold. Having married a water mitigation technician this was a non issue for us. In fact I fell in love with the potential of the 2 bedroom farm house, built in 1832, with a double lot yard, three good climbing trees, with a 2 story detached garage with sliding barn doors on the second story, and walking distance to the Erie Canal, the local library, and apple orchards.

We offered 75% of the asking price, and with fingers crossed it was accepted.

We were told it would be 60 days to close pushing out till the end of January before we could even start working on it. We gave them them three weeks or said we would walk. I am happy to say that we close tomorrow.

Sure it didn’t check off every box on our wish list, but no dumpster house would have. Its farther away from our family and friends than would have been ideal. We will have to continue to pay rent for the next three months until the house is habitable. My husband will need to be working round the clock essentially building our family a home.

But I can see the potential. I can finally see the direction our family will be moving. After having been displaced four months ago, it’s the first time I feel like I can take in a full deep breath. Everything is going to be OK.