How'd we get here?

Since I've already written a little about the "here," I figured I'd mention the various weirdness and coincidental occurences that enabled us to buy this house.

We'd been looking for some time, but our requirements were pretty particular. We wanted something with a little land. We wanted something OLD. We wanted something that hadn't been "updated" to within an inch of its life. Basically, we wanted something that hadn't been touched. Ever. Well, at least not for a long time.

Fast forward several months, to the day we offered on a grey farmhouse that we both loved. It was built around 1850 and, on the surface anyway, appeared to be in pretty good shape. What an eye-opener the home inspection turned out to be! Bad roof, moisture in the walls (to the point where the wallpaper in one corner was thumbtacked to the stud because the drywall had disintegrated...the sellers had thoughtfully covered this up with a fairly large and heavy piece of furniture--thank goodness we had a strong home inspector who felt that moving furniture was part of the job), drainage issues, you name it. The house had been cosmetically kept up but the major systems had been left to go downhill. We were still seriously considering it: after all, we were wanting a project house, weren't we? But in the end we couldn't make it work, so we walked away.

Funny thing is, we'd looked at the house we eventually bought earlier and had decided it required a tad too much work. So we had turned our attention to the grey house. Talk about irony! Our Victorian farmhouse is in great shape structurally. It's fairly plumb, and the sandstone foundation is laid with absolutely lovely, knife-thin mortar joints. Lovely, I tell you.

Let me tell you a little bit about what attracted us to this place. It sits at the highest point on 4 beautiful rolling acres, yet it feels completely secluded. When we initially called the realtor for a showing, she described a bit about its history, all of which made us positively salivate. Then she dropped the real bombshell: the house was being offered with all of its contents, whatever they may be, as a separate negotiable item. I'm sorry, did you say ALL of its contents? Zowie.

Here's the house:

Nice, eh? It sits on a hill (good drainage--definitely a plus) and is just surrounded by lovely mature trees. Gorgeous! It's a fairly simple Victorian farmhouse with just a hint of gingerbread. It's enough for us. We love the layout, the details inside, and the setting that we practically drooled over.

Welcome to our home!

And here's (for me) what clinched the house. The kitchen. No, I'm not kidding. I'm entirely serious about this. Most historic homes have new kitchens that look new. Nothing against nice, new kitchens, but in my opinion they don't belong in houses like this. We're waiting awhile before we do anything with this, mostly because it will probably cost big bucks, but also because we'd like to do any major work like this sensitively and using appropriate materials. Yes, we're probably crazy. Crazy about this old house! :)