picture courtesy of www.thegailforce.com
photo courtesy of www.circaoldhouses.com
photo courtesy of www.zillow.com
A few firsts in our house hunting adventures…
The top building is an old neighborhood store just a block from our Locust Street apartment. It was the first place we envisioned ourselves owning. We would have loved to turn the ground-level into a studio space for CT and the top into an industrial living space. As much as we would have loved to stay in our neighborhood (just blocks from the Plaza, Westport, and the art museums) the space was an empty shell and would be too costly for us to renovate.
The middle house is the first we trudged through the snow to view in February 2014. We looked at several Tudor-style homes on the south side of KC and really liked their quaint and charming character, but as most of them were built in the 20s and 30s, they were on the small side, needed a lot of updating, and didn’t have the extra space we would need for CT’s studio.
The bottom house is the first we put an offer on. Built in 1936, The home had three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a recently finished basement, a sun room, and a large patio in the backyard. The hardwood was gorgeous throughout and the fireplace created a perfectly cozy environment. Though it wasn’t quite our taste, the kitchen had been renovated. To top off our excitement, there was a tandem detached garage off the back of the property that would have eventually made a great studio space. The neighborhood wasn’t ideal, mostly because it would add driving time to my morning commute, but we thought we could live with that. After a couple days of weighing our options, we put in an offer we were comfortable with. Unfortunately, a higher offer came in that same day. We declined to get into a bidding war and continued our search for the perfect first home.
