Buying the House I Didn't Want

In fall 2015, we started looking at houses. Here's the checklist we gave our realtor:

• Under $180,000 - really we wanted a lot cheaper
• About 2-3 bedrooms - kids are a big if for us, so we just needed a guest room since my family visits from out of state
• 2 bathrooms, 1 with a bathtub - I like to read in the tub 
• Fixer upper - we wanted to feel like any change was an improvement, not superficial preference
• Walkable to work in under 20 minutes

Chris had this bad habit of looking at houses outside our price range, which annoyed me. At one point, he showed me a house listed for $225,000 with a weird room:

What the heck is that room for? What is that thing to the right? We speculated that the house must have been some sort of B&B. 

We drove by the house to try to figure it out. This is the back side of the house. 

You'd never suspect, that this is the front side of the house.

It's like two completely different houses glued together.

Chris wanted to go see the house. I told him he was out of his mind, and I refused. 

It was huge! It has 2 kitchens, 2 bathrooms, 3 official bedrooms, a finished basement, a giant mudroom, a dining room, a living room, and of course the strange room (it's a sun room by the way).

A month or two later, the house dropped to $200,000. It had been on the market maybe 150 days with no bites. I agreed to go see it to get Chris to shut up about it.

Not only was it huge, but it was weird.

What the heck could we do with this long bedroom? By the way, this view is from the french doors that open from the dining room into this space. Weird.

I said no way. We didn't need that much space. And it was too strange. I had no idea how to solve the problems posed by this house.

Chris was excited. He was fascinated by this puzzle. He wanted this house. Chris doesn't get excited about anything, so I said okay and started brainstorming what we could do with it. The one bonus was that the house had been split (sort of) into 2 rental units, so we could rent out part.

Here's how we ended up:

• We got the house within the budget we set (barely)
• Despite being huge, it really only has 3 bedrooms, though one of the bedrooms is used as a living room for our tenants. So at present, it's a huge house with 2 bedrooms.
• We got 2 bathrooms, but since we rent out part, the bathroom with the tub belongs to our tenant. It's a sad existence for me.
• It's sure as heck a fixer upper. More than we bargained for.
• It takes 30 minutes to walk to work. 

Yeah. We failed utterly in our goals. And I often have to bite my tongue so as not to say "I told you so." Despite being really careful with additional inspections, we had to replace the furnace, AC, and water heater right away. We knew going in that the gas lines and water supply lines all needed replace. All that, puts us over budget, by a lot. Becoming owners of this house was a stressful nightmare.

At this point, Chris wishes we'd bought something else, and I'm attached to this house because we've been pouring our hearts and souls into it. I'll try to catch everyone up on our projects soon. (We've been at it just shy of a year now.)