Sometime this summer, Daughter will move into the fourth home of her two-year-old life. And she likely won’t move again for quite a while (at least relatively speaking) because…
…we’re buying a house!
So, the outside looks pretty sweet. As do we. Look at those smiles! The closing date is set for the 18th.
We’re pretty excited about buying a house. We made the decision to go house shopping after making the (even harder) decision to stay in Sioux Falls, at least for the foreseeable future. Buying would let us either lower our monthly housing costs or at least let us build some equity. Or both. We started looking for a fixer-upper. We wanted something on the low end of its neighborhood that needed the kind of work that we could do with our homeowner skills– the skills that have been languishing during our time in an apartment.
We found a house in our price range with a lot more than we were expecting. We looked at a whole slew of houses with a lot of what one might call “potential.” This house has potential, charm, and space– space to grow and learn as a family, space to garden and brew, space to make some improvements and build equity, space to run new wiring and repair plaster…
Here’s Daughter trying to get back out onto that porch. As you can see, the inside needs some updating. But it’s livable the way it is. After all, someone was living there the way it is.
Nice high ceilings… some higher than others. Note the OSB ceiling– if you want to make a false ceiling even falser, that’s how to do it.
This house has character(s).
Here’s the kitchen. The cabinets above and around the sink are the only built-in cabinets in the kitchen. So we’re going to need to remodel with some more functional counter space– all planned around that awesome stove.
Here’s the staircase down to the side entrance and the basement. We’ll leave this the way it is at least for now.
The stairs go up to the bedrooms on the second floor.
The door on the left goes to some storage space. The door on the right goes to the big space in the attic!
This bedroom’s ceiling is in good condition. Most of the plaster in the house has been covered with paneling. We might have to replace a lot of the walls with drywall. I am anxious to pry off the paneling and find out what’s behind it!
The quartzite foundation appears to be in good condition.
This is what the listing claimed as a second bathroom. It will be redone at some point.
The backyard is the only part that is smaller than some of the other houses we looked at. It is also bigger than some we had looked at. So it is just medium-small. This corner has been overtaken by some lovely ferns and violets.
Did I mention that the house is walking distance from The Downtown Library? Mmhmm.
More pictures and videos and before-and-afters after the 18th!