Have you ever imagined something and had the privilege of seeing it come to life? Done something so scary you just are breathless in the doing?
We imagined a life where we’d buy an old home or cottage at auction and then own it outright. We’d live in our modern home in town while we worked on it. Weekends would be celebrating every weekend, creating beauty together in a place we’d call our home… after all we are a blended family, we understand about accepting things as they are, and restoring them to something beautiful.
It was such a romantic dream.
Home ownership, bought at a bargain. It would actually be prudent and pragmatic to do this, right?
The feelings that lure you with “it’s going to be sooooo good to be debt free”
Dreams are ahhhmazing things.
After my father died in 2013, after caring for him in person, as the primary care giver with hospice coming one day a week…he was a doctor, a do-er, and yet at the end of his life while many many things were accomplished, he warned me to do what mattered for time is such a non-renewable resource.
I was very aware that life has an end point. That my time is truly limited. That postponing your dreamed of life is ultimately giving your best life away.
Within eight weeks of his death I convinced Feller that it was time to buy our dream space or to stop talking about it.
Mind you, it made no sense, we own a home in town that is 100% complete, fully decorated, landscaped and ours. The house in town had hot running water, a roof that didn’t leak and immeasurable comfort…but of course, by then dream fever had taken ahold, our common sense was waining.
I can be a strong persuader…(well, some folks believe I missed my calling for being a corporate litigator) So off we went to Tennessee to buy a lovely little farm house on the hill, with a beautiful hillside view…
We arrived to find it sold. The perfect home in the perfect community in the perfect state, just outside the perfect town….sigh….
It had been perfect, visually pretty, a little wonky but in that good, old farmhouse kind of way.
We were so sad an offer beat us by minutes. However I am not one to give up a dream without a fight. If you don’t first succeed, I believe in digging in and building your dream differently….
Enroute home to Alabama, I was scanning the ads, newspapers and notices.
Fifteen minutes from where Feller supports Department of Defense contractors there was a poor, pitiful, needing alot of love tacky brown house…a HUD home…one that might have been lovely at one time but currently looked rather homely.
There’s tar paper on that house. TAR PAPER…. the bane of my existence…of course, being a family that values doing hard things… and one who eternally wears rose colored glasses of what could be, not what actually is at the moment…I didn’t see that at all when we were seeing our finished DIY project in my head…
Les, who apparently had lost his right mind, the one I count on…. immediately said “let’s do it” so much for counting on him to be the sensible one, but law and behold, I found myself at a closing…for a house without a working bathroom…in the middle of the coldest winter on record…
and so the adventure began. It would seem that pigs would fly, we bought the tacky brown house with cash….or at least we bought a shell of a space that might someday be a home…with a downpayment of owning the building, for it was far from home with the cash invested.
to be continued
#TheTackyBrownHouse
