Do you have a place in your city that every time you drive past you just LOVE. Not love like “Oh that’s cute!” but love like it instantly triggers a gut reaction and you are caught up in a fairytale? I totally do. Many a place actually, but none more than this house. It’s my favorite place, and its for sale. Friends meet my dream project.
We scheduled a walk through with our realtor and I was 100% confident that Court would love it as much as I did. In my mind I could hear him saying:
“Of course we can buy this house!”
“You’re such a genius for thinking of it!”
“You’re right, it wont be that horrible to fix up!”
“Thank you for bringing so much joy into my life!!” etc. etc.
In reality, we hadn’t even parked before he said “You are out of your freaking mind. This is never happening.”
Sometimes all you need in life is a billion dollars.
The house was built in 1909 by a pioneer family. It is solid adobe brick and for the last 20+ years has been used as a rare book store. The giant Mulberry tree in the front is as old as the house!
It seems pretty teeny in the pictures because the windows are so huge, but if you look at the size of the door you can see that it’s actually pretty tall.
This is what you see when you walk in the front door. The space is really huge, especially for an old house. The ceilings are 13 feet tall!
To the left of the main entrance is a smaller parlor type room. Don’t you want to die over the doorways and transom windows!?
Dyl was a little nervous….she’d never been in a Romance Room before.
If you walk all the way through the hallway, you end up in the kitchen (or if you go through the doorway at the back of the first room)
The kitchen is my favorite room in the entire house. There is just something magical about it.
This little corner in the kitchen above the window had the most amount of plaster/brick damage downstairs. If you look closely, in the crack you can see where there is daylight coming through. But man, look at the plaster ceilings in there. (And that pink is perfection!)
There is a small one room addition to the left of the kitchen that’s a little um… stressful?
Back into the hallway is a bathroom that has been remodeled. Which made me kind of sad.
And to the left of the bathroom are stairs that lead to the 4 bedrooms.
They are full of abandoned bookshelves.
Behind the faux brick panel the plaster had come off of the ceiling.
The last bedroom is my favorite. I am pretty sure that every single one of us (except Court) audibly gasped when we walked inside.
It is kind of hard to write about how much I love this house. It is my absolute dream. I cant even imagine the work that it would take to fix it, but can you picture how beautiful it would be?!? The house is currently under contract (not with us) and I have no doubt that we would be into it at least $350k before it was livable.
But man it would be worth it!!
You know the saying If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, then it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never meant to be? That is kind of how I am feeling about this guy. I am utterly terrified of it and at the same time it is all I can think about (shhhh don’t tell Court, as far as he knows I’ve given up all hope!) I just love it SO. MUCH. Who knows maybe the buyer will back out and I’ll win the lotto? Maybe I have an uber rich reader who wants to buy it for me purely for the entertainment value of watching as it pushes my life to the brink of destruction? Maybe the seller will come down 100k on the price? Maybe I just need to trade my first born?
So many maybes, and lucky for me, maybe leaves a little room for dreaming.
The best thing that came out of this entire situation is that is pulled me out of my creative funk. HOLY FREAKING TIME!!
So what do you think? Would you ever take on a project like this? Which room was your fave? Have a good maybe to add to my list?
