Previously on....

So, here we are. I guess introductions are in order. I'm Matt Waldron...



















This is my wife Jenn...




















And, uh, this is our cat Raven...



Jenn and I have been living in an apartment building owned by my brother-in-law Ken for the 1.75 years we've been married. (She's actually lived here for a few years.) In this time, we've been able to pay a good portion of the debt that has crippled us for years. Taking our improving financial status into consideration, we decided that this summer would be the best time to buy a house.

We had already turned down an offer from my Mother-in-law's friend. This woman's mother was moving out of this nice twin house and she wanted to make sure that it went to a nice young couple that would take care of it. However, the price she really wanted was about 40K more than we could afford, and no legal amount of seller's assist would bring it down to our level. More than that was the fact that the roof needed to be fully replaced within 3 years and the hot water heater in the basement had recently exploded, filling the basement with about 8 inches of water for over 24 hours. The likelihood of mold becoming a new freeloader in the house was pretty high. If we had gone with that house, we'd be a whole lot poorer than we are now...and would be for much of the foreseeable future.


So, we started seriously looking at houses for the first time on July 8th. It was the weekend after that long week full of rain we saw here in the Philly suburbs in early July. We saw 6 houses that day...5 of which were row homes in various states of disrepair or mold infestation.

Now don't get me wrong...a row home is fine (row home/town house/cluster home/whatever). I lived my entire life up to college in a beautiful row home and never voiced any complaints (except maybe about the walls being pretty thin). I love my parents house and I attach no stigma to that type of home (of course, it's not like I can afford to, anyway). However, most of the homes we saw that day were cramped and dark with damp, foul smelling basements. Some of them had finished basements with powder rooms, etc, but they still seemed to need a lot of work...or mold removal. Some were still wet from the rain a few days before. That's never good.

One house seemed to have been rented out to a few people that may have been going through a rough period in their lives. The basement there was pretty bare except for some randomly sawed off plumbing sticking up from the concrete floor. It had a room in the back where they evidently kept a dog. Its chain was still there, wrapped around the door jamb through a ragged hole in the wall. It was obvious that the dog constantly chomped at the doorway and wasn't very well house broken. Upon inspecting the inside of that room, we saw a hole in the one wall. We tested it, and sure enough it was perfectly fist-sized. It was not a happy home. Also, it definitely had Wacky Shack stairs into that basement, a la the Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse buy that factory.

So, most of the houses were a disappointment and we started to wonder if we'd ever be able to find an acceptable house within our price range. Then we saw it. I think it was the second or third house we saw that day, I'm not sure. It was the only twin house in our price range within our defined area, so we figured there must be something horribly wrong with it. As it turned out, though, the house ended up being very charming and extremely well-maintained! We finished looking at the other houses, unable to stop unconsciously using the twin as the basis for comparison. When we got home, we both agreed that we'd probably never find anything quite that good in our price range again and decided to make a move on it the next day.

And here it is, almost exactly a month later and the closing date is at the end of the week! Holy crap, we never realized this kind of thing could move so fast. So now, we're in a frenzy of packing, often forced to shun any and all social contact. But more on that in a later post.

I'll end this first real post here. I have a few more on the way (with many more pictures) as I try and catch up to present events. This blog is really meant to be a record of the move from our old apartment to our first house and the subsequent improvements made to said house...mainly to keep our families updated and to have something cool to show our kids years and years from now (assuming Blogger doesn't get dumped by Google before then or whatever). If other people enjoy it or get some helpful info from it, then so much the better.