Buying Our House

Chris and I have lived in our house in Durham for almost 11 years. We were living in a rental house (about 4 blocks away from our house) in June 2009. 2008 had been a big year for us: I graduated law school, Chris started a new job, I took the NC Bar Exam (and passed!), Chris proposed, and then as soon as I found out I passed the Bar, I started a new job. And shortly after we started wedding planning for a September 2009 wedding. You know what was not part of our plans? Buying a house.

By June 2009, we were coming down to the wire on wedding planning. We were both working full time and life was fairly chaotic. So I didn’t think much of it when Chris came home from work one day and said, “You know that house nearby that we both really like? Well I just saw that it’s for sale.” “Oh, cool,” I said, probably distracted with going over our guest list again.

The listing photo for our house in 2009.

But then we looked up the price and realized we could actually afford it. The housing market was just starting to come back from the recession, but interest rates were still super low. Once we realized that it was in our price range, we drove over and peeked in the windows. It had been gutted and renovated and was in great condition. It was an old house with lots of character (that’s what you say about flaws - they all just add CHARACTER), which was exactly the kind of house we had always envisioned buying. The timing was terrible, but one thing happened after another and we found ourselves closing on the house and moving into it 30 days before our wedding.

Baby Chris & Caroline in front of our 900 sq. ft. rental house.

Our rental house was 900 square feet. Our new house was 2700 square feet. We moved all of our furniture and stuff to the new house and still had several rooms that were completely empty. When I was talking to my Mom on the phone (it was the last few weeks before our wedding so my Mom/wedding planner and I talked several times per day), she said she could tell when I was walking through our dining room because she could hear the echo.

Listing photo of the dining room, looking into the living room.

So scheduling-wise (and financially), it didn’t make sense to buy the house right then. We had spent most of the little money we had (remember I had just finished law school) on our wedding and honeymoon, so we had nothing to spend on the house. But since it had just been renovated, it didn’t need a lot of work. We had ideas of what we wanted to do to it, but that would be “down the road.”

The house has 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, hardwood floors throughout (some that were original to the house), and 2 kitchens. It had been split up into apartments at some point before being converted back to a single family residence, so there was a space upstairs that had cabinets and counters and a sink, but no appliances.

Listing photo of the back of the house. The exterior staircase led to the upstairs kitchen.

Most of all, it was BIG. And that appealed to us. We were 100% in the mindset of “the bigger, the better.” We knew it was more space than we needed, but I’m pretty sure that if you had heard our conversations about the house at the time, the phrase, “we’ll grow into it” was said a minimum of 8,648 times. Approximately.

Side story that’s not completely relevant but very much illustrates the frame of mind we were in. The house came with a dishwasher and oven, and we already had a washer and dryer, but it didn’t have a fridge. We went to a home improvement store and picked out the one we wanted. It was more than we should spend (not that it was super high end, just that we were that broke), but they approved us for a loan so we bought the fridge and excitedly waited for it to be delivered. One thing we didn’t let stop us, and didn’t even think about, was a pesky little thing like measurements. When I was out of town at my bachelorette weekend, Chris called to say that the fridge was delivered, but it wouldn’t fit in the space that was built into the cabinets for it to go. We debated for a few minutes, but we were already completely overwhelmed by everything, and we had a little room (maybe a “breakfast room”, but the only thing that would fit in there would be a tiny cafe table) right next to the kitchen. We decided we would just put the fridge in there until we figured out what else to do. “Besides,” we thought, “a big kitchen remodel is only a few years away.” (Cue maniacal laughter of present-day Chris and Caroline). In August, we will have lived in this house for 12 years. Would you like to guess where the fridge is currently? It’s in the same place, only we now call it the “refrigerator room.”

Listing photo of the kitchen. The refrigerator room is through the doorway on the right side of the photo.

Our house appealed to me in so many ways. Neither Chris nor I are new construction people. We will never live somewhere with an HOA, we don’t like neighborhoods where the houses are identical or are shoved up right next to one another. This house had a big yard, looked nothing like any other house nearby, and had great history and character; in short, it seemed pretty perfect. And while there are parts of this house I’ve loved, I have come to terms with the fact that buying this house was a huge mistake. A mistake that we’ve lived with for 12 years. Sure, you can throw this in the category of “hindsight is 20-20,” but I would still argue that even in 2009, we should have been able to recognize that this house didn’t work for us. When you have 5 rooms that are mostly empty or are just storage, you don’t need the house. Period.

We didn’t buy this house because it was great for our life in 2009. We bought this house because we thought it would be great for our future life, 10 or 15 years down the road. The problem with that kind of thinking is that you might end up exactly where we did, in a house that didn’t fit us at all because the life we actually have 10-15 years down the road is completely different from the one we planned.

I would love to go back and talk to June 2009 Chris & Caroline. Explain to them that for years, they would be very very cash poor, because they were buying at house that was too big, and too expensive. I’m not sure we could talk our younger-selves out of buying the house, though. At that time, we were sure that it was perfect and exactly what we needed. “So what if there will be empty rooms, we’ll grow into it!” Sigh.

This house has taught us so much, though. A huge (and unbelievably expensive) lesson in starting out small, and buying for what you currently need, not what you think you’ll need. Wherever we land, our house will be no larger than 1500 square feet, and we would prefer more like 1200 square feet. Less space, less house, less STUFF. 2009 Chris & Caroline believed that “more is better & bigger is better.” But fast forward 10 years and we’ve learned that filling a huge house with huge amounts of stuff just means you have a lot of stuff.