Welcome home!

And isn't it a great place to be? We certainly think so!

After living in Seattle for almost two years we decided to take the plunge and buy our first home. Not that we didn't love our apartment, I mean look at it!

And the view!

oh, that's Norman enjoying his window seat...

But with only one bedroom and rent being basically money down the drain, we were ready to move on.

When we started looking we were all over the place (for those of you unfamiliar with Seattle it is basically a collection of small neighborhood style districts centered around a compact urban downtown slowly getting more and more suburban as you get further away. Obviously this makes choosing where to live tricky, as each area has it's own style and quirks.) My husband and I both grew up in very rural settings in California and started out thinking we might like to live somewhere with some space. We looked at a few places with acreage like this one:

And this:

And actually made an offer on the last. Definitely a work in progress, but with the price around 250,000 it seemed like a good deal. But boy do banks make life difficult to buy a fixer! Luckily, when Daniel starts a project he does it thoroughly! (a trait I'd love to foster in myself) No matter how excited we were about a potential house he always kept looking for what else might be available.

After the Woodinville house fell through (3 months after our initial bid), we fell back and regrouped and decided to reevaluate what we wanted out of a house. I had been a little worried about buying something that needed so much work (which incidentally is how I became obsessed with reading DIY house blogs) and we realized after 3 months of driving all over King County we liked living in the city! In fact we loved where we already lived! (who wouldn't? I mean look at these views)

But, we always thought it was way out of our price range. After looking at our options, we pushed up the maximum price on our search results and this showed up just 7 blocks down and 7 over from where our apartment was.

                                                                (photo courtesy of Redfin)

From the picture on the MLS listing I was skeptical, but I'm pretty game when it comes to seeing the inside of a house so we called our Redfin agent and asked for a tour. Immediately I knew I wanted to live here. It was the perfect mix of style and class (I mean look at that chandelier!)

The house had been on the market 223 days which of course begged the question "what's wrong with it?" I mean, look at how many people looked at this house without putting a single offer in!?!?

(those are all the different agent cards left at the house. Daniel counted 150 different cards, some were repeats)

Well maybe it was things like this that turned them off...

Yeah, they spray painted every surface they could white. Including the antique brass door knobs.

And it was priced alarmingly high. But I wanted this house. No, I NEEDED this house! So my lovely (and diligent) husband did some research and we made what we thought was a reasonable offer on the place. And they took it!! (well, there was some haggling but that wasn't too exciting) A home inspection and one month later it was ours! Just wait until you see her. I guarantee you will fall in love.