In the Beginning…We Needed a House (Part 2)

Hey there, thanks for joining again! So in my last post, we were getting ready to begin the journey to finding our Young Victorian in the Colorado mountains. But first I had to share some of our backstory and it was a bit of a downer. But it was also an incredible opportunity for growth and lessons learned and for that we are grateful. And now it’s time to focus on how we stumbled upon what we’ve dubbed Annabelle’s Place!

Getting Ready to Buy!

We left off with us moving to an apartment for what we thought would be just a few short months. We diligently did everything we could to prepare for the process of purchasing our next home. We planned for the timing, divulged to our mortgage broker our short sale history, got pre-approved for our loan, you name it. And we thought we had the perfect broker; someone that came highly recommended and whom we had been talking with for months.  And so when it was time, we began looking for just the right house. We found a great real estate associate by the name of Randy Almquist with Colorado Home Realty and he helped us to begin our search. I warned Randy in our first conversation that he was going to either love us or hate us because we were pretty wide open as to where we wanted to live. We just wanted great property! We started trekking all over the place but continued to predominantly end up in the mountains. There was something that just kept drawing us back to the listings there and it wasn’t long before we realized that the mountains were truly where we wanted to be.

Ready for Mountain Living

After viewing many houses, and making the trek up and down the  hill numerous times, we began to get a little discouraged. Most of the properties were limited in either their size or the flexibility of the property (think lots of hillsides with unusable land or extreme dirt roads with tons of switch-backs). One day, I decided to up our price range online by just a bit to see what was out there. Who knows, maybe we could get a lower offer accepted and still come in at the top of our budget. And that’s when I spotted “the” house. It was definitely out of our price range and when it came up, I realized that I recognized the house. Months before, I was checking Zillow periodically just to see what was on the market. Dreaming I guess you could say. And I distinctly remember seeing the house. At the time I thought wow, someone has really put a lot of work into this house to make it look completely Victorian and I would have to undo so much of that, it would just be a shame (plus, did I mention it was out of our price range?)

Meant To Be!

Now here’s this very interesting house popping up again and I start to think, maybe we should look at this one a little more closely. After going through the images again, I did notice that it was definitely not in pristine condition and my thoughts started to shift to “well maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty about making it a little less Victorian after all.” We would later be surprised to find out the house was less than 20 years old, hence the term Young Victorian! Since the house had been on the market for several months, I thought we may just a have a shot at getting it for less if we really liked it. Time to call Randy!

On our way up to the house, the area we were travelling through was gorgeous and the closer we got to the house, the more excited Warren and I started to get about this house. When we arrived at the house, and certainly upon entering it, I think Randy thought we were a little delusional. As we walked through the house for that first time, Warren and I were both on the exact same page. We were excited about the potential this house held and lucky for both of us, we could see through all of the disarray and the room after room of wallpaper and the stench of what smelled like carpets that had been graced by dog urine, over a really long period of time.  Here’s a peek below at the inside of the house in some of its former glory (don’t worry, we’ve got plenty more of this awesomeness coming in future posts!)

Looking Past the Ugly!

We were looking and smelling past all of it, the different wallpaper in every room, wood trim painted to match each wallpaper, the floral carpet in several rooms, the icky tile and faux brick walls in the kitchen, and the lovely red, green, and yellow siding on the exterior. Warren and I were both so excited for the possibilities and we knew instantly that we wanted to try and get this house and fix it up. Breathe some new life into this poor neglected Young Victorian.

Best Laid Plans

And now, all of that diligence in preparing for the loan and closing process would surely pay off! Ducks all in a row! We put an offer in on the house and before you know it, our offer was accepted and we thought we were good to go. That was mid-September. The entire story is way too long to go into detail but basically, that fantastic mortgage broker completely dropped the ball. Due to our short sale, we had to jump through some hoops to qualify for our loan. And that’s okay because we were fully prepared for those hoops. And after numerous assurances by the broker that we were “good to go”, “no worries”, “everything’s ready”, we found out at the last minute that a huge deadline had been missed (even though I called 3 days before to be sure we would hit the deadline) and with that our loan was a bust. There was a very real chance of losing our Young Victorian at this point.

Loan Rescue!

Ughhhhh, how could this have happened? The mortgage broker did not even have the courtesy to contact us himself and own up to his team’s negligence. Poor Randy was the one that called to give us the bad news. We were devastated and were told we were going to have to wait for up to several months to get everything corrected and to be able to qualify for a new loan. But then Randy to the rescue found us a new mortgage broker who was sure he could fix the issue sooner and ultimately he did. The only problem was that we had a seller who expected us to close on the house by the end of October and there was no possible way that was going to happen. Fortunately, the sellers were willing to wait.

Time to Walk Away?

It was a long process righting the ship that had been nearly capsized by our first broker, but in the end, we did finally close on the house but it wasn’t until late December and after way too many months of living in an apartment. Time and time again, as hurdles would crop up during the purchase process, we wondered if God was trying to tell us to “RUN”, “Get out while you can”, “Back out of the deal”! But we powered on, just sure we were merely being challenged to persevere and that is just what we did!

So that’s it, that’s our sad story about how long it took to actually purchase Annabelle’s Place. Oh, and she didn’t have that name when we met her. She had no name, but I was just sure she deserved one! She’s a Queen Anne by design and I don’t know, Annabelle just sounded fitting. You will meet her namesake in a few short posts! Back soon – {Shelley}