A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.
-Colin Powell

It all started with a thought.

One evening, a few months ago, Tyler and I thought it might be a good time to hunt for a house. We both have good jobs, interest rates are really good, and we kept hearing that the Raleigh house market was expecting to bounce back soon. So we figured we’d start looking.

We looked at properties all over town- Apex, Fuquay, Holly Springs, Durham, and Raleigh. Every place we went to, there was something wrong with it- backyard too small or a mudhole, no garage, on the highway, house too small, weird layouts, bad neighborhoods. We must have seen almost 20 houses. Only two stood out to us.

The first was an adorable house in Apex, very convenient to the highway but sans the noise and located in a mature, impeccably maintained neighborhood. The drawback- it was on a pond. While the survey said the plot was a third of an acre, in reality it was about half that- thanks to the inclusion of the pond. Not very helpful when half your land is water! However, the layout worked, we loved the neighborhood, and we kept thinking about it.

The other was a foreclosure. Sure, there were holes in the walls, a jungle in the backyard, and carpets that even the bravest soul dare not walk barefoot upon, but again it was located in a fantastic neighborhood, had the best layout we’d seen, and all .4 acres were dry! After much soul searching, and discussing whether or not a project was right for us, this is the house we put in an offer on.

The great thing about a foreclosure is that you can get a good deal. The downside is that you buy the house ‘as-is’. We could inspect all we want, but we couldn’t turn on the water or gas, and HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development- US government) wasn’t going to help us to discover the history of the house.

The other downside to this whole process is that we had 15 days to inspect the house and back out if we could. You might be thinking “2 weeks? Sounds long enough!”, but unfortunately, those 15 days included Christmas eve, Christmas day, New Year’s Eve, and 2 weekends- a tough time to schedule inspections, tests, and any other thing for that matter!

Nonetheless, we did it all, and came within hours of the 15 day notice and committed to the house. The house on the hill would be ours.