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Back in 2011 my boyfriend* and I bought a house together. I had the credit, he had the down payment- it was a match made in heaven. I've told the story to anyone who knows me a few times already, but in case you don't know me (yet), here goes....the story of how we bought the house. But first, here's a photo of the house from 2011, before it was ours.   That magical feeling under the camphor trees, June 2020 The curbside appeal is everything with this house. This is important, because it was the curbside appeal that drew us in. We were walking through the neighborhood from our rental flat just 4 blocks away when we spotted the "Open House" sign and decided to take a quick look before heading on to Sacramento's first edition of SactoMoFo. We were just trying to get that pre-kid, pre-vegan food truck grub, but something about this open house made us pause here and let our tummies grumble as we walked through. It didn't hurt that it was on the corner of one of the most picturesque blocks in Midtown, lined with green lawns and mature shade trees. The homes are perfectly set back from the street, aligned bungalows, each built with custom Arts & Crafts details by developers Wright & Kimbrough between 1907-1909. Bungalow Row, as it is known here in Sac, is a Historic District designated by the City of Sacramento, and one of the special places where one can experience an in-tact, contiguous groups of homes built in the California Craftsman Bungalow style. The homes were built in keeping with the City Beautiful movement that was forwarded here in Sacramento by Wright & Kimbrough, with their development of natural land into neighborhoods filled with modest bungalows, which then functioned as peaceful, lush, streetcar suburbs for the middle-class. Certainly, the fact that every home on the North side of the block bound by 25th and 26th, along Q Street, is built in the same style, has the same setback allowing for a nice front green space, and has 100+ year old mature trees with giant canopies in front of them, makes this particular corner house have a special "magical" feeling. It was fortunate for us that we happened to be strolling by on that day of the open house in 2011. After our walk-through, we were entranced by the Q Street Bungalow. We had been casually looking at open houses and had seen a couple of properties that didn't really speak to us, though they had potential (side note: I WISH THAT WE WOULD HAVE BOUGHT EVERY.SINGLE.ONE. It was 2011 after all, and prices were quite depressed after the Subprime Mortgage Crisis had wreaked havoc on the market) Anyway, we rightly were thinking, "wow, now might be the time to buy a house...the prices have really gotten more affordable" and we were looking for a small home that would allow a couple to live nicely and pay about the same as our rent, but get some skin in the game. When we walked through, there were some obvious issues (Pink tub, pink wallpaper, pink EVERYWHERE...also backed up water standing in the only bath in the only bathroom, foreboding our coming years of mandatory attendance at the plumbing school of hard-knocks) STILL, we could not walk away feeling anything but completely twitterpated with this wreck of an old house, the "magical cottage" with the giant camphor tree canopy. We had been dating** for a few years at this point, and we had been walking this neighborhood together long enough to remember quite clearly a time when we had walked by a house with a "for sale" sign on the same block, saw the price tag, and laughed at how there was no way we could ever afford to live on such a cute little block. Now, the price tag was...almost 50% reduced and suddenly within our budget. The food truck event was on Saturday, April 30th, 2011. By the time we got there, the lines were comically long, even for a kid-less duo to endure, so we ended up eating elsewhere before looking at another house over by Southside Park that we were already planning to tour. We walked through the other house (again, I totally wish we would have bought this one too) , but our hearts were back at Q Street. This Southside Park house paled in comparison to the magical bungalow, just as every house that we had seen before did, and we knew Q street was THE ONE. We worked with the agent who was showing the house and put in an offer on Monday, less than 2 days after stumbling into the open house, then bit our fingernails while we waited what seemed like months for the short sale to be approved by the lender. It was 2011, so almost everything was a short sale, and at least we weren't kicking anyone out of their home. The previous owner had taken out a reverse mortgage before passing in her old age. People often ask me if she passed in the house. I don't know, but it wouldn't bother me to know that she passed away in the beautiful bungalow that she probably treasured, surrounded by her pink rose wallpaper, pink extension cords and floral pink towels, pink tub, and whatever else made her happy in this life. Either way, it was in some sort of quasi-bank owned limbo when we made the offer, and we waited for awhile to find out, then had to wait a few more months to move in, but WE GOT THE HOUSE. We moved into the house in September 2011, were married a year later, and had our first son the next year. A couple years later, baby #2, another boy came along. Now we are a family of 4 living in a 110-year old 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom bungalow with just over 1,000 sf. of livable indoor space. It's been interesting and wonderful. Now that the boys are a bit older (6 and almost 4), we're ready to do all of those "house-projects" that didn't get done while we were busy having babies and getting them to this stage. There's a lot of deferred maintenance, and there's the issue of only having one bathroom for a family of 4. We are hoping to address it all and slowly restore this house, while also updating it a bit for the current century, keeping it true to the Artistic style that it was built in all those years ago. The Arts & Crafts movement was all about rebelling from the machine-made clutter of every day life and surrounding yourself with simple, natural, and soulful beauty. That speaks to so many of us humans, especially in the current era of disposable***, plastic, factory-made everything. I can't wait to share with you all the work that we've done and will do on the house, as well as some of our adventures as a family. Here's what the house looks like now- we've just had the porch restored and couldn't be happier with it, but I'll save the details for another time.  * Yes, I bought a home with a man that I wasn't even engaged to. The teller at Wells Fargo who issued our check for closing purposes threw us so much shade for being an unmarried couple, essentially tsking us when she saw the different last names and lecturing us about what we were "getting into" To be fair, this could have ended badly, but for us, it didn't. ** Shacking Up *** But not really. See, the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
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