Shortly after we had an accepted offer on the house, and still a couple months before we moved in, I got an idea about how to fill one of those rooms, namely the loft. It was something I had wanted since I first saw them in the mall years and years ago.

 

 It came in a discrete box, but with a little unpacking and a lot of fluffing

 It became a giant foam filled bean bag roughly the size of a couch, made by LoveSac. Luckily it was on clearance, as they are way more expensive than I imagined. We are still a little unsure of how we will be getting it out of the house.

March of 2009. I’m not sure what the exact day was, but we moved in our stuff and realized: we don’t have much stuff. In fact, We had bought a big, empty space and had nothing to fill it with. The only thing that was making it look somewhat full was our extreme lack of organization, shown in the following the photo:

 

 Once we got things somewhat cleaned up, it was clearer. We had a lot of mostly empty room, no decoration whatsoever.

We were home shopping in somewhat of a rush back in 2008, because we wanted to quality for a tax program that gave first time home owners $8,000 (thanks Obama!). We looked at quite a few foreclosed homes with a budget of $90,000.We stuck to the west side of Indianapolis because the homes offer more value per square foot. Also, as a result of the way the city developed, there was a massive inventory of new construction homes sold during the bubble. We were afraid to get an older home, as there is inherently more cost in such a purchase. We made an offer on this one:

The one in the middle, that is. It only had a one car garage, but we liked it all the same. Here it is on Trulia (which is a real estate website). We thought it would be perfect, but someone placed a higher offer than us and we didn’t get it. We were discouraged at the time, especially because it pushed us getting into a house closer to our wedding date. After looking at more places with our realtor, we found a common floor plan in late ’90s construction that we liked: two story living rooms with lofts. He took us to several with that basic floor plan, but one stood out. Maybe because the front looked so unassuming:

Half that tree was missing as well. The porch was so dark and small, I don’t think we were expecting to see this when we opened the door.

I think the biggest surprise was how bright it was. Because we were looking at foreclosed homes, they were often poorly lit. All the south facing windows and open floor plan filled the house with light. There was no noticeable damage either, unlike many of the other homes. To our standards, it was move in ready.

Except for appliances. It did need appliances. And some upper cabinets. Feeling the stress of work, planning a wedding and looking for a home, I told Aaron that we should put an offer on this house and if it fell through, we would just wait till after the wedding. Not wanting to stay in an apartment, Aaron agreed to offer near the top of our budget to ensure we got the house. We probably overpaid, but it was accepted, and soon enough it was ours. Soon enough being the four months it took for the paperwork to be cleared.

I started this blog while we were planning for our wedding, but once we decided to buy a house, the posts stopped. The home was foreclosed, allowing us to take advantage of some tax incentives at the time and have instant equity as owner occupants. Three years later, we have done many improvements and are ready to sell the house. We’ve learned a lot along the way, chiefly that 1. homes have a way of absorbing both time and money in a subtle, effortless fashion and 2. yardwork sucks.