REAL ESTATE TIPS: House that works isn’t always ‘perfect’

We love our home. There are also things about our home that I don’t like. For example, our house is small. When you have four kids and add company, it can feel like you are on top of each other. Our back yard is wet. I know that it is wetter than most yards because I show homes for a living. We only have a two-car garage. With four cars and bikes for everyone, our garage is beyond capacity and we aren’t allowed to have a storage unit where we live. Our house is dark. I love a lot of natural light.  We don’t have that. Even in the middle of a summer day, I will turn my kitchen light on to be able to see.

Because of these reasons, a few years ago before we added onto our house, we talked about moving somewhere else but just couldn’t do it. Every house that we looked at was newer, bigger, and had a master bath (which we did not have at the time) but none of them felt right for us. Three of the four homes we saw were in our neighborhood but not as close to the school. Currently, there is never a point in my little boys’ walk to school where they are not visible to either myself or a crossing guard. One was a ranch which we loved but it had a mostly finished very awesome basement with only one small room for storage, which won’t work for me. Another one had five bedrooms so the boys would have their own space and couldn’t blame their brother for the messy room they share. But the location wasn’t right for us and the yard was small.

While we were on this journey a few years back, it confirmed what I had seen for years. There is no perfect home. That is true even if you build. Once you move in, you will still find things that you wish you had done differently. I think that knowing this takes off pressure to know that no home is perfect whether your price range is $50K or $50 million.

For us, our location trumps everything else. We still don’t have a three-car garage ‑ we never will. We still have to park on the street or bottom of the driveway for the boys to be able to play basketball or ride their bikes in the driveway. We still have a tiny dining room. But we don’t want to live anywhere else. We have seen bigger and better but for us it wasn’t home.

Find one that you can make your home or that has a feature ‑ regardless of how crazy it might seem ‑ that makes it better than the rest. I have found that people often buy a “starter” house or a home that they weren’t 100 percent sure on, only to fall in love with it and never move again.

I wish all of you luck and success on the home buying journey. May you find a home that has something about it that makes you go from “this could work” to moving in and realizing that this is “the” house. I hope that in 2020, your good memories in your home, no matter how long you have lived there, will far outnumber any bad ones (like a few years ago when one of the kids was so sick, we slept on the living room floor for three nights and washed our hands so much with a particular smell of soap, we can’t stand the smell now). And I hope that you have a blessed week!