We came up with this plan to sell our house and buy another home on a larger lot – about one acre, maybe even one that already had a pool. A lot that size would give us room for a pool, if it didn’t already have one) and a garden, room for the girls to play, and room for the Hubby to putter around doing whatever it was he wanted to do with this larger piece of land. The girls and I knew what we wanted to do – we just wanted to spend the summers in our pool!
We looked and looked and looked at houses. Let’s just say that real estate photographers are really amazing, because every house that looked perfect in pictures and sounded great on paper had something that just didn’t work. Each house we thought we would love either needed way too many improvements, or was in a flood plain, the neighborhood seemed run down, the school district was wrong, or felt like it was in a galaxy far, far away. I have always said that anything more than a 5-10 minute commute was too long, but of all the houses we looked at, my favorite one was about 40 minutes away from my school. Thankfully, the owners of that house made the mistake of painting the beautiful stonework and ruined the beautiful house (in my opinion), because that commute would have been the end of me.
So, after months of house hunting, Hubby went on a business trip to Las Vegas and when he came home, I immediately told him that I’d solved all our problems while he was gambling and I had found the perfect solution. He immediately replied with, “If you are talking about the land right up the road with the house that has been in a fire, NO.”
Well, of course that was the land I was talking about! It checked all of our boxes and then some:
- It was a few acres (about four)
- Close to his job
- Close to my job
- Would keep the girls in the school district I felt they needed to be in
- Would keep the girls in the same elementary school they were already in with their friends
- Close to Target/Tulsa Hills (totally MY wish! Ha!)
And BONUS – that land had a pond! So what if it had a home we would have to demolish?! I’d already looked into the cost of that, and I had driven onto the lot and decided that it “felt right” to me. (He often teases me about that…but I am a firm believer that if I walk into a house and it doesn’t “feel right” then it is not okay!) And BONUS #2, instead of remodeling a house, we could build again and build the house we wanted and the pool we wanted! JACKPOT!
So, he thought about it for a few days (really without my knowing), then we both made some calls and he agreed that we should put in an offer. We made our offer, it was accepted and we closed on the land about six weeks later.
Some pics of the land from the fall:
