Spring of 2010 - A brief recap

Ok, so, when I last posted over a year ago, we were living in a one bedroom apartment ("The Dorm"), we still owned our condo in Fitchburg, and I had just started a new job.  That was March of 2010.

In April we finally got an offer on our condo in Wisconsin, so we casually started looking at houses here in Michigan.  We weren't expecting to get serious about a house until the fall; we wanted to give ourselves some time to recoup after losing money on our condo, and to make sure we found the right home in the right location.  But then our realtor showed us the blue house on Henrietta Street.  It was a short-sale that had been on the market for a while (I remember looking at the listing online when we first found out we'd be moving to Michigan back in October of 2009).  After seriously comparing some of the other options available at that time, we knew we needed to act fast if we wanted a chance at this home - it is located in a GREAT neighborhood within walking distance of downtown Birmingham, it's on an extra-wide lot with a good sized back yard (a big deal in this area) and the floor plan is open and has some serious potential.  We made an offer, and after some serious stress related to both the closing of our condo in Fitchburg and the new house on Henrietta Street, we finally closed on June 4, 2010.

Now, we knew this house was going to need some work, but we had no idea just how much of a "fixer-upper" this place was going to be...

Long story short, the previous owners hadn't lived in the house for months; the house had been winterized (so there was no running water or electricity when we got the keys), the refrigerator was missing, and they left an entire house and two-story garage full of junk for us to get rid of.  To say it was absolutely filthy would be an understatement.  It was a total disaster.  We had no choice but to extend our stay at "The Dorm" by a few weeks in order to give ourselves time to clean the place up, buy a fridge, get the power & water turned back on, etc.

The whole process was SO overwhelming that I didn't didn't even think about taking any good "before" photos of the mess we started with.  I do have a few photos taken during the appraisal, which I will post along with the "after" shots once they are ready.

We've come a long way since June 2010, and we still have a long way to go to make this house the way we want it.  But we have learned a lot since then, and all of our hard work is finally starting to pay off!