The Time We Learned What Makes Buying A Fixer Upper Come To A Screeching Hault

I dreamed about this day when I was little.  Yes, some girls dream about Prince Charming and dressing up for their senior prom... Not me, I dreamed about owning my own house.  Well, I take that back, if I'm going to be completely honest with you I dreamed about Prince Charming, but my handsome Prince had a tool belt and paint smears on his carpenter jeans.  My dream guy would be able to get down and dirty on house projects and he would be right there beside me, working on the house of our dreams.

I should also clarify that I didn't ever want the typical "American Dream" house.  No, I didn't want the perfect-suburban-new-construction-never-needed-anything-keeping-up-with-the-Jones' kind of house.  I wanted a house that needed work.  Lots of work.  I wanted to find a house that I could sink my highly *un*skilled hands into.  Yeah, I might have been an idiot with unrealistic dreams, but I knew what I wanted and I was willing to put in the work to get it.

When my husband and I married we went right to work trying to find a house.  I kid you not.  We really did go right to work trying to buys a house.  But, there were always things in the way of purchasing a house.  We found quite a few great houses that we loved.   One of the very first houses we looked at wayyyyyy out in the country (seriously it took 20 minutes to drive there from town and about 40 minutes to drive to work).  It was very picturesque.

The property and views for the first house we fell in love with.  June 2012.

The house itself was all the things my husband and I wanted in a house.  It had gorgeous old details (like the glass door handles).  It had space for our growing family (it had 5 bedrooms which we dreamed of filling with children, playrooms, and office space).  And it needed more work than it would take a small construction crew with years of training to complete in a reasonable amount of time.  It was perfect.

The first house we fell in love with.  Man did that thing need work.

The problem was, a construction crew had been working on this house, and they had been doing a fantastic job, but they had also run out of money.   Yep, the place was a certified money pit.  But that little fact didn't deter us!  We continued to move forward on the *naive* assumption that we would find a way to come up with money where the previous crew hadn't.  We even drew up sketches of what this house would look like.

What I imagined the front to look like.

What I imagined the street-side to look like.

The list of things this house needed was lengthy and the more we looked into the details of purchasing it the more got added to that list.  Cosmetically it needed a bit of work to make it livable.  It needed some weather proofing exterior finishing, floors in a few of the main rooms, a kitchen (that's right, it had NO KITCHEN) and it also needed wall finishing and fixtures in most of the rooms.  Our plan was to live in the house and complete the work ourselves.  We knew it would take a long time to make the house into our vision, but that was part of the appeal.

But what we didn't realize was that there were two other major details that needed immediate addressing: the suicide french doors on the second floor (which my husband and I could both see our 2 children accidentally falling out of) it also needed electricity (yes, apparently there was some kind of issue where the house had been set up on a temporary electrical system due to the Sump-Pump in the crawl space, but it wasn't actually connected to the grid in any official way).  These two issues were the downfall of our dreams and made buying this Fixer Upper come to a screeching hault.  After a handful of trips out to the house and about a month of working on finalizing the process, the loan fell through.  Apparently you have to actually be able to LIVE in the house in order to get a loan for it.

We were pretty crushed, but we knew deep down that deep down there must be a reason that this house wasn't going to be ours.  This problem isn't uncommon to home buyers looking in the Fixer Upper market.  Please share your experiences in the comments!