After having made an unsuccessful bid to purchase a house via short sale back many months ago, an agent in my office suggested I take a look at a house which I hadn’t considered.

The homes I had been looking at were primarily ramblers (or ranch, or one story, depending on your area).  Actually, I had a pretty detailed set of criteria:

• One story
• 3/4 master bath or better (full highly preferred)
• Big master bedroom (15 x 12 minimum)
• 1980’s and newer
• 1500+ sq ft on the main floor (bigger room sizes)
• 4+ bedrooms (for roommates, office, guest bedroom)
• Walkout basement
• Big 2 car garage
• .4 acre lot or bigger
• Privacy off back yard
• Inside the 94/694/100/394/494 NW quadrant
• Under $375k

Needless to say I didn’t find much for sale!

What I’ve always hated about a traditional two story home (I call it a center stair two story) is the formal living room.  See, I don’t have a piano, don’t read books (Google is my library), and don’t know why you would sit in a room without a TV/DVD/stereo/computer/etc. so I see it as space that I have to fill with nice looking crap that won’t get used!  I LOVE modified two story homes and those with stairs on one side of the house or the other because it eliminates that room but keeps all the other goodies that a two story offers:

• Separation of bedrooms from living areas
• Big master suites
• Most/all bedrooms on one level
• Bigger room sizes, since foundation size isn’t the issue
• Dramatic curb appeal (when done right!)

Due to the area I was looking, there aren’t really any two story homes with the floorplan I liked, so consequently I was looking at ramblers.  You have to get pretty big on the foundation size for ramblers before you get those bigger rooms and layout.  So, I made an offer on one in a short sale and several months later found out that we were $40,000 off in price and they didn’t want to budge.  So, bye-bye offer!

I went around and looked at some other ramblers, but none of them really caught my eye.  I was very disappointed and had decided that things were not going to work out right now when one of my coworkers suggested a property she had seen.  She said: “Aaron, I know it is priced higher than you wanted to go and it’s a two story, but it is a really nice house and you should take a look at it.”

I got the address, pulled it up online and decided to take a look.  Long story short, she was right… it was a great house!  Went back with another coworker who thought it was solid too, had him write an offer (more on that in a future post) and some back-and-forth with the seller and now I’ve got a new home!

I’m still doing inspections and whatnot so I don’t want to get into details but needless to say I have a lot of things I’d like to tell you.  Stay tuned for updates!