About a month ago I decided it was time to take a break from pretending I have any sort of credentials for giving advice on relationships and decided to give my blog a new topic for a while.
Here is the first post of many.
Two and a half years ago I took on one of the biggest projects of my life:
The Nightmare on Elm Street.
(N.O.E.S.)
I got the idea from a friend to buy a house and then rent out the rooms to other college-aged people to help pay for the mortgage. I spent a couple months looking at house listings online and mulling over the idea of taking on this responsibility. The market was the lowest it had been for years and I'd always wanted a house of my own to remodel the way I envisioned it could be so after a while I threw the idea out to my mom and she told me I was crazy-- that I was 19 years old and didn't understand how big of a deal buying a house was. Why didn't I just focus on college and then maybe a car once I got a real job and then I was allowed to start thinking about a house.
That changed within the month :)
I showed her a few of the houses I had been looking at and after explaining my ideas she became hooked too. We spent the summer stalking houses online and then in person.
I found a house I loved that had recently been remodeled. 3 bed, 2 bath. Beautiful pine cabinets in the kitchen. Adorable little breakfast nook with red walls. Giant 3-car garage that I planned to renovate. We put down $1000 and waited... and waited.... and waited.... Moral of the story: short sale=never gonna sell. We walked away. Found out later no one ever put another bid on the house and it sold on auction for about half of what we offered. Guess they should have sped things up.
Another house I fell in love with I called the "dream house." (When you're looking at that many properties you have to come up with nicknames and I had quite a few-- dream house, dead cat house, 3-car garage house, AZ room house, backyard stairs house.. usually named after the features that left an impression.) The dream house had also just been remodeled. 4 bed, 2 bath. Gorgeous kitchen with beautiful dark tiled countertops and a red barn across the back fence. A house full of my boy friends live there now.
The house that I saw and knew I'd found what I wanted was the 9th Place house. 5 bed, 3 bath. Living room and family room. Basement. Kitchen cabinets I was going to paint all the colors of the rainbow.
We didn't get it and I was devastated.
At that point I kinda gave up. I was sick of looking for houses. I had already found the one I wanted and it was gone so I marked my project as failed. Shortly after my mom woke me up early one morning informing me that she had found the house we were going to buy. That's really confusing when there aren't any houses you're looking at.
The house had been listed that morning and we made an appointment to look at it first thing the next day. When I walked in the front door I thought... okay this is a whole new level of gross. I've seen some pretty dirty, abused houses on my tours but this beats everything. Then I walked into the master bedroom and knew I wanted it.
Thus begins the story of...
THE NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.
I plan on writing a post for each section of my house-- showing the change over time.
The links below are posts I wrote while the house was in progress and they contain writing and photos about the house along with all the other things going on in my life at the time.
I don't expect anyone to read all of them but I would recommend the first.
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