Isn’t it charming? It is located in Hudson, Ohio, just off the main square. M called up our real-estate agent and set up an appointment for us.
It is not our ideal house, only two bedrooms, one-car garage, small yard. This forced us to discuss what our priorities really are.
Our ideal house is:
older with lots of character (even a fixer upper)
affordable (our max price is $150,000)
in a great neighborhood
3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
on a nice size of land
2 car garage
Of course we realize that we’re going to have to compromise somewhere. In the case with the Hudson house, we’d forgo the 2-car garage and get by with 2 bedrooms because it is such a desirable neighborhood and charming house. It would certainly be a "starter" house.
We went to look at the house on a Saturday morning. It's even cuter in person. Definitely an old house, with almost no straight or level lines. But we liked it enough to bring my parents back to the official open house the next day. There were some issues, a couple trees will have to come down before they fall down, and some dirt is poorly leveled in the back that will certainly lead to drainage problems.
The owner is asking more than our max price, but we let our agent know we were very interested. M talked to her about our concerns and she talked to the other agent. He said there’s been a lot of interest, and the listing price ($169,900) was actually about $20,000 lower than what the owner wanted, so he’s probably not willing to take an additional $20,000 hit!
We’re not willing to go in over our heads so we didn’t make an official legal offer.
But we now have a better idea of what is important to us, and we have a potential color scheme for whatever house we end up buying! ;)
