So we thought we would take it back a little and explain the crazy process that landed us with this slice of farmhouse awesomeness in the first place.
Having gone through the house hunting process before, we sort of knew what we were looking for this time and did our now ‘usual’ process – live in the city for 6 months to figure out the neighborhoods and learn which areas we like, then start the hunt.
Well that’s all well and good if you move to a similar city. But we moved from Raleigh to Atlanta, and those do not two apples make. Think about moving from Little Rock to New York City, Ipswich to London, Annecy to Paris… you get the international picture. We had moved from a fairly suburban, small city with a tiny 4 street downtown to a sprawling metropolis which has a bunch of smaller cities within it. Ahhhh crap.
PART ONE: Ze MOOLA
So as we started exploring various neighborhoods (read: everything from Midtown to Dunwoody… i.e. half of Atlanta and a 20-30 mile radius), reality started setting in that our budget just wasn’t going to get us very far. Here’s the sticker shock we were presented with – even in some of the more suburban areas, we were informed that most houses in the $300-350K range were ‘tear-downs’. i.e. developers were coming in as houses were sold and the elderly residents passed away, buying up the property, tearing down the house and building million dollar monstrosities. This kinda, sorta, like OMG, blew our minds. Check out an example of a ‘tear-down’ in the pic below. Pretty decent little house, no?
Haha, yeah, well that… is going to get turned into this, and the price will suddenly be $900K in 6 months time. Same land, actually probably less of it, since the house will now cover 75% of the land; same potentially crappy houses next door; same lack of parking; no garage; right next to a main street. They get away with murder down here!
And this was the case in almost all of the neighborhoods we looked in where we were trying to meet our criteria – good schools, 3+ bedrooms, decent kitchen, etc. So we had ourselves a little come to Jesus moment. Or 6. The budget had to change. ::weeps::
Now, I won’t get into details, but let’s just say that all the praying and come to Jesus moments in the world, even for us non-uber religious types, didn’t help with how scary that change was. It wasn’t like my new job suddenly paid out twice as much compared to Raleigh, and Stu’s fancy computer job isn’t quite that fancy yet (one day, right?!). Debt is not an exciting endeavour.
PART TWO: WHAT UP HOTLANTA*
*note – zero people who actually live in Atlanta called it Hotlanta. Practically get deported from the city. Don’t do it homie.
We had spoken with a couple friends who lived in Atlanta, one who chose the suburban 1-hour commute life with a bigger house, nice land, guaranteed good schools, and the other who chose the in-town short commute, but smaller house and you had to pick the right school neighborhoods. It was a good balance to have them each weighing the pros and cons of what they had experienced, and even more helpful that they knew each other, so were actively trying to convince us that their neighborhood was the better idea.
There was one thing that we didn’t shake through the whole process – we knew we didn’t want to be in the ‘burbs again. We LOVED our last house in Cary, NC, but we didn’t love the neighborhood and succumbed to spending weekends at home rather than enjoying the fares of the city life. That helped us tremendously with re-defining our Atlanta boundaries, and meant we took our search more in-town. Here’s a handy dandy map of Atlanta for our non-Georgia based brethren:
PART THREE : Hello my Pretty
At the same time, we had been cruising the streets of Atlanta checking out every open house we could possibly find. [For our English friends, can’t remember if open houses apply in both countries – but essentially estate agents sit in the house they’re trying to sell for a day, loads of people come by, and they pedal you with a load of complete and utter rubbish about how great the house is along with a pretty flyer.] We literally just drove around and stopped, all weekend, for months. It was exhausting! So many sales people. Ick. But luck would have it that we stopped by a house on the border of Decatur, and we met the most amazing estate agent, Thomas McCullough. We absolutely hated the house he was selling – old, smelly, way too much money to fix on top of the asking price, and on a main road with not much land – but he was so helpful in teaching us more about the area, what we needed to look out for, and genuinely being a nice guy that wanted to introduce us to Atlanta. We were hooked! So we phoned him up the next day, and so began our hunts with Thomas. He was like Hammy from Over the Hedge when we entered a house – literally ran around the whole thing, turned on lights, came to find us and told us everything to look out for in one minute, and then sat and read his emails on the couch. No idea why, but it was just our style. Left us alone to figure out what we wanted.
We absolutely fell in love with Decatur, it’s got a small city vibe (maybe because it is one…) where the people are very friendly and welcoming, the schools are great, and it’s just far enough outside of Atlanta to have hipster, made from scratch ice-cream, yummy mummy elements. For reference on the map above – Decatur’s in that sweet spot between “Prime Real Estate” and “Dirty Hippies”. We spent a few magical weekends in Decatur falling in love with even more – the restaurants (Iberian Pig for our ATL friends – tapas!! do it!!), the cute downtown area with fun shops, the colleges, the running space. Ahhhhhh! And of course, we ended up falling in love with a house too. This pretty guy – and oh dear lord, we were putty in that beautifully groomed back garden. We met the neighbours, there was a white Range Rover club for the stunning wives of the cul de sac, planned our running routes, Lex was practically in the yoga club already, all we had to do was buy it and move in.
But alas it wasn’t to be. Taken out from under us with no chance to even fight for our baby, we were well and truly welcomed to the cut-throat Atlanta housing market. Where there be good schools, there be crazy people willing to pay insane amounts of money for a house.
PART FOUR : The House will be OURS
So after we spent a week mourning the loss of our fabulous new neighbours, out we went again. We expanded our search to some of the other in-town areas including Ansley Park (‘the vegans’), West Midtown (‘young urban professional folk’), Morningside (‘prime real estate’), Virginia Highlands (‘gentrified’), Inman Park (‘stoned’), North Decatur (‘decatur ft wi-fi’), Emory (‘rich white liberal douches’) and Druid Hills (‘ze jews’). By this point, we had reached the weekend of July 4th, two months after starting to look. Stu’s parents were in town for some holiday festivities (just a few Brits celebrating American independence…ha!) and we promised ourselves we’d only look at two or three houses maximum that weekend.
As we were looking at the second house of the day, I got a text from a friend saying that their friends were about to put a house on the market literally down the street from where we were currently looking (and not-so-coincidentally in their neighborhood). We swing by, and check out the house, super creepily just standing staring at it.
Me, Stu, his parents, and Thomas. Just standing. Staring. At a house.
Long story short, turns out we’d met this guy before at our mutual friend’s party and he welcomed us in to look around. We fell in love all over again, which was crazy because it was the total opposite of Mr Perfect Decatur above. But the 1/3 acre lot was incredible space for so close to in town with access to all the amazing restaurants and in good proximity to a great school. It was the happy in-between area of ‘all the vegans’ and ‘middle class people who want to look rich’, with a fair amount of ‘gay folk’ thrown in for good measure and fun. Unfortunately the guy and his wife were getting a divorce, so the house had to go. But one man’s loss is another man’s gain – and we had to take it. So with the house not yet listed on the market, one offer letter and some very awkward text messages and an even more awkward closing with the divorced couple, The Urban Farmhouse officially became ours on August 7th! WOO!
