New House. No Kidding.

People, we're doing it.

We're buying a new house. I mean, new to us. It's old. 1920s old.

Seriously. We mean it. Ok, so we haven't closed yet, but we're gonna do it. We had the inspection and everything. There's no turning back without losing a pile of cash. I even turned off my automatic real estate searches. All 26 of them.

Here it is:


But don't get too excited. It's kind of in shambles. Not just kind of. Seriously. VERY.

You are going to think we're nuts. I think we're nuts. We're going to move from our lovely, nice, finished house to a smelly, ugly, catastrophe. (Seriously. Our nickname for it is "the old shitter." Chad said to me - "but I don't want to move into the old shitter", and it just stuck.)

But why, you ask?

Because it's got tons of POSSIBILITIES. Possibilities that we can actually afford to complete in the very near future.

We decided that we didn't want to wait until we were 40 to get the house we wanted. We wanted to find a way to make it happen now, while we are young, but on a budget. How could we do it? We went round and round. We almost bought tons of other houses. We stressed. We looked. It's not easy having champagne tastes on a PBR budget.

The option that finally made sense to us was to buy a run down house, for cheap, with good bones, good space, in a good neighborhood, that needs all new interior work, but no space additions. We found it. We bought it. Whew. All it took was a little over 2 years.

It's going to take some work. LOTS of work. TONS of work. But we get to make it our own. We get to make it 20 times better than the house we have now. Well, at least 4 x better, since it is twice as large, and since we now have some experience with this renovation stuff, hopeful we are twice as good at it. So that buys us four multipliers of improvement. We hope.

So, instead of going on a awesome tropical vacation, we get to go on a awesome home renovation adventure. Hmmm... wishing I could have both....

It's a duplex now, but we plan to convert to single family. Renters live in both floors, so we have some time until their lease is up to plan for the new adventure.

We're working with an architect friend to draft up the plans.. and also working through the logistics of being landlords.

Working to prepare for a new adventure ... but still dreaming of Thailand beaches. And winter hasn't even hit yet!