My First Offer

House hunting was never big on my to-do list. I always said I'd buy a house when I got married. Plus, I never wanted the responsibility of taking care of a house on my own; especially the outside. Back in October I believe it was, I was sitting at my dad's and he asked me if I was ever going to buy a house. I said, I didn't know because I wanted an unusual house. I wanted the hard wood floors and the character. All of which come from buying an old house. I had a house in mind that I had seen online quite a while ago. I pulled it up on my phone to give my dad an idea of what type of house I would want. Much to my surprise, the house was listed as a short sale so now it was in my price range. My dad grabbed the phone and called his realtor. In short, I went and saw the house, put an offer in, and my offer was accepted. This all took a few months because it was a short sale, so you're dealing with the bank. Once the offer was accepted, I had an inspection done. Sadly, the inspection failed horribly. 

Over the course of those few months, I found out who owned the house. His name was John Charles N. My dad's name is John Charles M. The owner's late ex-wife's name was Susan. Susan is my mom's name.  The address to the house is 526 (W. Rudisill) which equals 13. The lot number to my child hood home was 13 and the lot number to my dad's house now is 13. Before I saw the house the first time, my mom found an article online about the house being in the historical society. The article had a picture of the owner, John Charles, on the steps of the house. It was a pretty cool article. I'd post the link here, but it's no longer up on the newspaper's website. I told my mom that if I bought the house, I wanted to frame the article and hang it somewhere. When I first went to see the house, I was going to walk downstairs into the basement and there was the article left hanging in the stairway. Underneath the article was another article about the Chicago Cubs. My dad is a die hard Cubs fan.  

Sadly, like I said, the inspection came back with mildew, asbestos, foundation problems, and a host of other things.  Being that the house was in short sale, the owner, nor the bank were in a position to fix these repairs. 

Here are pictures of the house. It truly was just as amazing as it looks, if not more in person. 

Front of the house.



The house was completely covered in vines. It made it look haunted, but also was cause for concern as to what it was doing to the foundation of the home.

Driveway/Garage


Patio.

When you walked in the front door this was the living room.
The french doors led to a hallway, which I'll save for last.

At the end of the hallway, was the dining room. I LOVED the color of the dining room. You'll see in the picture that there are french doors in this room too. That buffet is built into the wall too. It was awesome.

When you walk down the hallway from the living room to the dining room, there were several rooms off that hallway. There were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a huge walk-in closet.

 I called this the black and gold room. 
It was going to be like an office for me.


This room was going to be mine since it was red.

I mainly took these pictures just to remember the colors that were in the rooms. The third bedroom, I never did take a picture of. But, it had I believe three colors to it. I was going to make that the spare bedroom. 

This was the closet. It was basically a small room that had all these cabinets. I loved it. Off the closet, there was a door connecting to the bathroom.  Nothing spectacular about the bathroom. It did have a huge white medicine cabinet. 

Off the dining room then was the kitchen.

From the kitchen, you went downstairs to the basement. Here is the article about the house. 

The basement was just a bunch rooms randomly sectioned off with concrete. It was no where near done.

There was a finished bathroom downstairs, but it had no door. Totally random.

Now, to my favorite part. I'm sure you're wondering why I keep raving about this house and why I wanted it so badly; so far it just looks like a basic house, huh?

The french doors you walked through from the living room to the dining room lead you down what they called an atrium. Here's the atrium. 

AMAZING, right? You can see the french doors at the end of the hallway and that's where the dining room is.  You'll see there's the crown molding around each door way. The first door on the right was the black/gold room, then the second door on the right was the room I said would be mine. The first door on the left was the spare bedroom, then there's the bathroom, and the closet.  Here's a up close picture of the crown molding around each of the doorways. 

It gets better though. You can kind of see the ceiling in the atrium picture. Here's what you saw when you looked up....

The whole ceiling was stain glass. 

Amazing house. Just not for me. I'll post pictures of my house later on once the kitchen decorating is done.