Split Focus

For almost as long as Pete and I have been together we've had to split our focus between multiple houses. There has never been only one project to tackle for us. I guess you could call us a combo of over ambitious mixed with a little bit of attention deficit. Because of that we tend to be all over the place sometimes when it comes to progress and what is coming up next. There are always a few things waiting in the wings.

Pete's first house, which I consider the first door, is now a college rental a half block from our Alma Matter. Funny side note, we have both lived there- but never while officially living there together. He had roommates until moving out for the Wtown house, which is when I then rented it with my girlfriends for my junior year of college. At first it was just being a landlord and having the fixer upper...

As the Wtown house plunged deeper into renovations we started to talk about how much we loved the house and what it was becoming. All our hypothetical plans revolved around keeping the house forever. In those future plans was the long term goal to get a place at the beach.

A few years later that goal got realized when Pete made settlement on a small one bedroom condo down the shore. And with that we walked on through the third door, which is on the third floor of 123 street. The condo greeted us with the wonderfulness that is older generation beach house decor. Think lots of fake plants, lighthouses and fish statues.

There we were, busy with life in general while balancing rentals and renovations on the house front. So what do we do? Simplify? No. We go out and buy the cheapest, biggest POS house in the whole county with the idea of 'flipping' it. Time goes on and while we're talking about all our flipping renovation plans it slowly start to dawn on us that we love the new crappy house. and that house is where our future really lies.

and that my friends is the (very condensed) story of how we got to the now. Which is a current gut renovation on an unlivable house, a home on the worst selling market in recent memory, tenants that have illegal cats and who painted the living room in leopard spots and a retreat that got hit the hardest when the real estate market crashed.