A Tour of Our Dream Home
The backstory of this enchanting house and if we're moving forward with it or not (eeeeeek!)
Hi everyone!!! Happy October 1st to all who celebrate this wonderfully cozy month in all its glory. It’s our favorite month of the year, and not just because our wedding anniversary falls on the 17th.
How was your weekend? Were you able to stay safe (and dry) with all the storms we’ve been having? Luckily where we live it was only just a ton of wind and rain and muddy driveways, but I know others haven’t been as lucky. You can click here for resources to help those affected by Hurricane Helene, if you want.
Right before the storms hit last week, we took a tour of our dream home. And when I say dream home, I don’t say it lightly.
It checked all the boxes (well, almost- we’ll get to that in a second) and then some. It’s a house we’ve been eyeing for a while, first having seen it last Thanksgiving when we went to an estate sale there and were in awe of every room we rummaged through, and also made out with two portraits that currently live in our dining room. When we were at the estate sale, the person running it told us there were already multiple offers on the house, which was a complete bummer. We were too late. We thought we had missed our chance and did our best to quickly forget about it.
Which is why I was so surprised when we drove by it last week and saw painters there and the yard looking cleaned up. There was definitely activity happening and I had to know what was going on. I texted a realtor friend of ours who also happens to live in the same neighborhood as the house in question. He told us they’re fixing it up with the intention to sell it and he’s already shown it a few times. He could get us in to see it that day, if we wanted.
Of course we wanted! Touring homes is a national pastime for us. It might possibly be our favorite activity to do, period. We told him we could meet him there in 10 minutes.
I want to preface the rest of this story by saying we had no intention of buying a house right now. We love our house in town (which is also the house I grew up in and lived in until I was 18) and we love the setup we have with the proximity to school and our moms. Is our house the perfect home for us? Well, not exactly. We would love a bigger yard and to be honest it’s starting to feel smaller and smaller as the kids get bigger and bigger, but overall we love it and it’s home.
But we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to tour this house now that it was empty and work had started to be done to it. So we met him there and walked through and I took a ton of pictures to show you.
Here are the specs of the house:
Built in 1981
4300 sq ft
4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
Sits on about an acre
In an established neighborhood
One owner
Custom built home that would cost over a million dollars to build today
And friends, let me tell you, upon touring it, the house did not disappoint. Where our house feels cozy and intimate, this house felt grand and spacious. With soaring 10 ft ceilings and tall windows galore, every room felt like it was inviting you to stay a while, to take in its beauty. There is a magical quality to the house. It feels enchanting in a way that few houses we’ve been in do. The reclaimed brick floor and salvaged windows in the sun room were so charming I could hardly stand it.
As we were touring it, we both started to picture our family doing life there. We could see our kids running around the long hallways and going up and down the two (!) staircases playing hide and seek. I could imagine hosting big dinner parties for our friends and family and welcoming them in the foyer.
But more than anything, we could envision celebrating the holidays in this house. It felt like it was tailor-made for holidays and we kept saying how much it reminded us of the houses from Home Alone:
And The Family Stone:
The latter of those movies has inspired my love of big, old houses (with a specific floor plan) more than any other movie/interior designer/book/Pinterest board ever has. I’ve had a dream of owning a house like that forever, and this home feels like we could finally make that dream a reality.
When we shared a little bit of the house on Instagram, we received so many messages about how you loved the house just as much as we did. “Buy it!” “My dream house!” and “If you don’t buy it, I will!” were all common responses. We also received a lot of texts from family and friends asking about the house and if we were going to make an offer, so it wasn’t just us who were enamored with the house. You loved it just as much as we did!
All of this to say, I wanted to share a room by room tour of the house today, and at the end of this post, reveal if we’re moving forward with it or not.
So pour a cup of your favorite beverage, settle in, and let’s all take a tour of our dream home, shall we?
