If this post were a song, it would go like this: “Let’s start at the very beginning….a very good place to start.” Julie Andrews, Sound of Music, anyone? Today, we’re throwing it back to our first house love, the fixer-upper that started it all. It’s where we learned to DIY, played with style and color, and found a creative outlet. It’s also the house where we brought home our first dog, got engaged in the backyard under the tree, and even threw a rockin’ rehearsal dinner for our wedding. I loved that house. Still do. And she deserves all the love. Here she is on closing day.
This is the story about how our first house came to be. From deciding to buy a house, let’s say it might have been a smidge impulsive, to the shopping process, and all the feelings about how she came to be ours.
Let’s Buy A House!
At the time we bought our first house, Colby and I had been renting what we dubbed the world’s largest one-bedroom apartment. It was huge. Two floors in a vintage 1800s charmer in a bustling city in Maine. We loved old houses and someday dreamed of owning one and renovating it. Although at twenty-six years old, a newly minted marketing manager with little savings, and a graduate student in the University of Maine’s MBA program, that felt like a pipe dream. Here’s our apartment hidden behind the trees.
One night, while attending one of my business classes, a friend and classmate told me she was buying a house with her husband using the first-time homebuyer tax credit program. Huh, I was intrigued. The program provided a tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time homeowners after closing on their first home. My ears perked up, and the crazy-loving-idea gears started to turn in my head.
That night, when I got home from school, I asked Colby how he felt about a fixer-upper. He responded that he has always wanted to buy a house to fix up, but didn’t think it was in the cards anytime soon. It took so much money to buy a house AND fix it up, especially as first-time home buyers, and he didn’t think we could do it.
I explained the tax program, another first-time homebuyer program that allowed us to purchase a home with just a few thousand dollars for a down payment, and showed him a few affordable listings in our area. He was on board for exploring it. We did the financial math, and the math was mathing. In the span of 48 hours, we figured out how we could swing it and purchase our first home. So long renting!
Ultimately, the plan was for me to buy the house. We weren’t married or even engaged at this point in life, and didn’t want to comingle finances, especially for something as expensive as buying a house. The money to buy the house would come from my savings, and the mortgage would be in my name. I would pay for renovations, and Colby would pay me rent to live there. Let the house shopping games begin!
House Shopping
We were such rookies when it came to house shopping. Note to self…write a house-shopping tips article so others don’t make the mistakes we made.
Our first rookie mistake was choosing a buyer’s agent on a whim. Basically, we emailed a real estate agency, told them we were shopping for our first fixer-upper home (read suuuuuper low budget), and asked for an agent. The one we were paired with was green and hadn’t been working as an agent for very long. Don’t get me wrong, she was an absolute gem, and we adored her. But when we asked questions, she often had to ask someone else for info before getting back to us.
We spent three weekends house shopping. On the first weekend, our dear agent took us around to four different places, all within our $85,000 max budget. For the record, these were 2010 housing prices. Prices in the market we were in have tripled since. There was a weird ranch down by the river in a small mill town, where we didn’t love the vibe. Then an over-budget cape in an over-taxed town that didn’t need much work, but we loved. And then there was the hoarder’s house.
The house was an estate sale where the children were selling their parents’ home. The house came as is and was FULL to the brim with stuff. To be clear, the house purchase came with the stuff. While we loved the house, we were a little apprehensive about all the things we would have to deal with. We decided to make an offer (our agent thought we were nuts) and turned to her to decide how much to offer. After consulting with her team, we decided to go a little lower than asking due to comps and the need to clear out the home. Spoiler, they countered with the asking price. We walked away.
During the second weekend of house hunting, we toured another charming, historical cape home with all the antique charm. It was amazing! It hadn’t been renovated and still had many original features, like doors, woodwork, and some bathroom fixtures. The home was dreamy. We knew we wanted to make an offer and again turned to our agent for price assistance. The home was listed for $80,000 but needed extensive renovations. Our agent turned to her real estate team, and the agency’s owner actually came out to the house with us to look at it and advise on pricing. He strongly suggested offering $60,000 based on comps at the time and the extensive work the home needed.
With an offer in, we waited. One of the stipulations in our offers was that the house needed to meet certain lender requirements for us to buy it. We were using a first-time homebuyer program that allowed just 1-2% for a down payment. One of the program requirements, which we didn’t fully understand at the time, was that the home could not have peeling paint. This house was oooozing with peeling paint, top to bottom, and was a foreclosure. While writing our offer, our agent was consulting with the business owner. He didn’t realize we were using this program and told our agent the house was a terrible fit. The bank holding the property would never agree to make the repairs necessary to meet the first-time homebuyer’s program requirements. We rescinded our offer before we even submitted it. We were crushed.
Third Offer’s The Charm
Then came another weekend of house hunting, and during this week’s tours, we came across a new-to-the-market home, right in our price range, with an unusually long yard for the neighborhood. Intriguing.
We had a hard time pinpointing the home’s construction style. It was built in 1910 with a gable front and an enclosed front porch. The porch was likely enclosed in the 1950s. The home was built at a time when farmhouse style was transitioning more towards colonial revival. Located in suburbia with neighbors on top of each other, it felt odd to call it a farmhouse. While technically it’s best described as a vernacular farmhouse, we ultimately called it our New England cottage farmhouse, mostly due to the decorating style we leaned into later. Because spoiler…we bought the home!
The house checked all the boxes. Three bedrooms, a decent yard, affordable, livable condition, a fixer but not too much of a fixer, and it was in a great neighborhood near a school. We looked at it first thing in the morning. Then we looked at it again and, for the third time in as many weeks, submitted an offer. This time, for just a few thousand under asking.
This is also a great time to note that to use the $8,000 tax credit program for buying our first home, there was a deadline. We had to close on the home by the end of June, and we were currently in mid-April. Time was quickly running out.
The sellers were happy to accept our offer, but with one edit. They refused to paint the front of the house, where it was peeling underneath the porch. Ugh, here we go again. This time, the amount of painting work was minimal. It would take a few hours, tops. We negotiated and asked if we could paint it while under contract to comply with our program’s requirements. Thankfully, they agreed, and we were officially under contract.
Under Contract
The five weeks we were under contract on our first home went quickly and easily. I was in the middle of finishing up projects and taking final exams for my MBA program, so I didn’t have much time to work on other things. Between work and school, I was tapped out.
One evening, just before the home inspection for our loan program, Colby and I picked up a couple of gallons of paint (off-the-shelf white in the cheapest brand we could find) and went over to the new house to paint the front of the porch. We painted the night away, our first of many evenings spent painting, renovating, or more likely, tearing something apart.
While chatting about our plans for the house, a woman came over from the house next door. Since the houses were so close together, we were painting within a foot of her driveway and expected a reprimand, even though we weren’t doing anything wrong. She came over and asked, “Are you the couple that’s buying the house?” Um…yes? And then she came over, doled out a great big hug, and welcomed me to the neighborhood. If there was any apprehension about buying the house, it disappeared that night.
Closing Time
Sing it with me, “closing time, open up the doors and let you out into the world.” Who got that one?! Semisonic’s “Closing Time.” When closing day came around, I was downright giddy. I don’t know how I made it through work in the morning before going to the closing at 2:00 pm.
While I spent an hour signing anything and everything, Colby was back at our apartment packing up his truck with things to take to the new house: the few tools we owned, a case of beer (Sam Adams Summer Ale, which has become synonymous with house projects at that home), and some snacks. The important things when you become a homeowner!
After turning over all my pennies and wearing out my signing hand, I returned to our apartment, where Colby greeted me with a bouquet of supermarket flowers (my favorite!) and a congratulations card. That’s the moment it set in that I had made a big move. I bought a house! I panicked for a moment, but then the excitement overtook the panic. Off to the new house we went!
Here is the 26-year-old version of me who has no idea what she just got herself into. Such babies, we were back then.
And one more shameless shot of the iconic moment unlocking my new home for the first time.
The First Night
We opted to keep our apartment for a little over a month before moving into our new home. This meant we could take our time moving and have time to renovate the house some before living there. I vowed never to take a shower in that bathroom, and we embarked on a full gut renovation of the home’s only bathroom in the first month of homeownership. But that’s another story for another day.
The first night at the house, we spent hours walking around, taking before pictures, and dreaming up all the things we wanted to do. We dove into renovation plans for the bathroom and checked if we won the floor lottery. Spoiler, we did not.
It was hard to lock up the house and return to the apartment that night. With school behind me until fall, I was excited about all the work we could do to make the house ours.
In the spring of 2010, Pinterest and Instagram weren’t a thing yet. That night, I turned to my hoards of magazine clippings of home decor and renovation ideas, searching for inspiration for the new house. I have been keeping these clippings since high school. Clearly, I’m born to be a home decorator and renovator. I was so full of ideas that I could finally put them into practice on our New England cottage farmhouse.
In the five years that followed, we completely renovated this home from top to bottom. It was my greatest creative work and also a place where I played with style and color. Looking back, we didn’t finish what we set out to do, but we came damn close. I loved that home. Scratch that…LOVE that home. Present tense. I would move back there in a heartbeat if I could.
Stick around for our renovation journey as I share all the before-and-after tours, project details, struggles, and behind-the-scenes info on our New England cottage farmhouse in Maine.
First project up, the bathroom. Here’s the shower that I refused to shower in.
I’m not sure it’s obvious in photos, but the shower paneling was disintegrating and flaking off. That, combined with some mold, gave major trepidations about using this shower.
Pssst…During this summer’s blog break, which seems to have become an unintentional annual sabbatical, I got to thinking about the old content here. There are some gems from our first home and fixer-upper in Maine! I’ve long wanted to rewrite, update, and fill in the cracks in the content surrounding our Maine house. And that time is now!
Psssssst…So this summer, I’ll be writing all about our first house. The goal is one room per week. So if you’re new around here, welcome!! And this isn’t our usual content, just a project I need to get out of my system before moving on to fresh projects and ideas. If it’s not your jam, that’s okay, just meet us back here in September.
Pssssssssst…Rewriting all the old content is also part of a bigger plan! I’ve long known the navigation on my site is awful for finding old articles and posts. This is part of the process of reorganizing all the content into a more navigable way.
