I love your house, Nikki! All that land... sigh!
We just bought a new house in June 2014. It's a 1600 sq. foot 3 bed, 2 bath house with a 1.5 car garage. It's in a very expensive (aka over-priced
) and desired neighborhood in the city due to the location, no HOA neighborhood, pool, parks and 3 Aated schools that are walking distance. We are also 5 minutes from the beach, which is awesome. We were looking in this area because it was the perfect area for Aaron to commute to work from... but could never afford anything decent. Then acquaintances from church told me they were selling their house and we were able to negotiate with them without a realtor, making it possible for us to buy here.
It has been a love-hate thing with this house. I go back and forth. The neighborhood is awesome... friendly & helpful neighbors, sidewalks, mature trees & fruit trees, huge fenced yards (huge is relative of course, but they are larger than the average in this area), and lots of kids out playing. It is a light, bright house with lots of windows and shady trees, and enough space for the 4 of us to spread out. The house is older, built in 1959, and has some quirks that make it difficult to repair at times. Old windows, old doors, old sprinkler system that was broken, it was built without central A/C and had to be retrofitted with ducts which were done incorrectly and don't cool the house evenly. Annoying stuff. And the 2 previous owners neglected it badly so it had a laundry list of repairs to be made. I am glad those acquaintances moved out of state because I have often wondered why they would sell this house to friends?! LOL. The worst was the roaches when we moved in!!! Thankfully, they have been dealt with! But... yeah. It finally feels like home but sometimes we just shake our heads and wonder why we bought this place. It's been a crazy stressful first year here.
But then there are days like this and we love it again. Here it is:
