the story begins

Redwoodshire is the place we call home.

Early in my marriage, my husband always said, "When we look for a house, the land is more important to me, than the actual house."  Keeping this in mind, our list of desires grew to a short list of the things that my husband and I both valued.

1.  Acreage.  Needed to be >1 acre, with plenty of sun for a garden
2.  First floor laundry- my desire
3.  Proximity.  Because we owned 2 rental properties in the city, we needed to be within a 20 minutes of the rentals.
4. Reasonable price

At the end of 2011,  I found a property on zillow.com, that seemed to meet all of our desires.  It was a cottage-like 3 bedroom house, nestled on 5.85 parklike acres, with 2 woodstoves, first floor laundry, 2 1/2 car garage, a barn/ workshop, pool, 3 tiered garden, surrounded by a creek...  Looked great! My husband looked at the photos, and noticed that the ceilings were quite short- being the 1850 farmhouse that it is.  And the price seemed quite low, considering the land and location.  He figured that the house must be pretty bad, since it had been on the market for a long time, and was listed at what we considered was a low price.  In my house browsing, I was continually drawn back to this house.  The only problem was that we had recently purchased a 3 family rental property the previous spring, and were not in a place to purchase our final home.  We were quite tempted to make an appointment to go see the house, but didn't want to fall in love with it.  So we didn't.  But we continued to talk about it.  Back and forth.  After a few months, we decided we should look at it.  We expressed interest with our realtor, and he contacted to seller (FSBO).  To our dismay the owner had taken the house off the market.  WHAT!?  So disappointed.  They took it off the market.  So that door was closed.  And our perception of that perfect property continued settle in our minds.  We wrote a letter to the seller, expressing our interest in seeing the property if they decided to sell again in the near future.  No response.  

Fast forward to 2013.  We began our house search for real.  With every house we looked at we constantly compared it to the house we loved, but never saw for real.  One day I asked if we could drive by it again.  And as we did, the house 2 doors down had a for sale sign out front.  We looked it up online, contacted the selling realtor only to find that an offer was already accepted.  She agreed to show it to us, in the even that the deal went through.  A beautiful turn key house, that had potential to meet a lot of our desires, except that it was no longer available.  As we talked to the realtor, we told her our story about the house 2 doors down.  She offered to contact the owner and see if they were still interested in selling.  Much to our surprise, she actually got in touch with the seller and they were still interested.  My husband set his hopes very low, considering the price.  Because he thinks I am the type of person who gets turned off by messiness while walking through houses, he told me to prepare myself.  I had already fallen in love with the property 2 years before, so basically I had already emotionally bought the house and imagined myself raising my children there.  We had decided that "you can always change a house, but you cannot change the land." We finally got inside the house.  And we left feeling extremely disappointed. Low ceilings, poor lay out, old kitchen, small bedrooms-  basically a poor old farmhouse.  We left that day, having closed that door.

But we continued to look, and nothing met our criteria like the other house.  So we got some ideas and a contractor.  He gave us hope that almost anything could be done.  We considered the work... made an offer... and bought that property.  And that is where this story begins.