Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2017

Coraline's Portal Might Be in This Old House

There is a little door deep inside a hall closet of the old house we just bought. The door has hinges. It has been nailed shut and floor trim put in front of it. Opening it will require tools and effort. While I want to rush in and open that portal... er, rather, I mean door, another part of me wants to savor the moment and speculate as to what could be inside. The house was built during World War II. It's been home to several families since then. How long has this hidey-hole been harboring its secrets? And what could possibly be inside? I've been showing the snapshot I took of it to family and friends during the past few weeks as we waited to close on the house. Soon, the house will be ours and we'll be able to unpack our tools and crawl inside the closet and look inside that little door. For now, I continue to wonder, and my imagination has run wild with the help of everyone who has offered their ideas, some practical-minded and others quite imaginative: Access...

Buying an Old House: Our List of Top 10 Considerations

Within two hours of looking at a 73-year-old farm house, we made the decision to buy it. Crazy? Our family and friends initially thought we were.  Our real estate agent was floored, too.  What sounded insane to others made perfect sense to us, as we'd been looking for the right house for a number of years. Over time, we had developed a list of requirements and considerations that, in the end, helped us know when we'd found the right one.  Believe it or not, we made an offer on this little gem over the phone on the drive back home, not wanting to give anyone else the chance to snag it from us.  We knew it was a real fixer-upper, but the house had a lot going for it, and we were prepared for what we were getting into.  Below is our list of considerations when buying an old house. Choosing the Right Location First of all, we wanted to make sure we were conducting our search in a community where we wanted to live.  That meant becoming familiar with the...