Why the Backup House?

…and the fanatical way we lost out on our “dream home”

Strap in, this is going to be a long story. So, once it was decided that I would move to the smaller town that my now-husband grew up and lived in, I had only two demands. I wanted the largest house we could afford, and it couldn’t be a new build. Coming from the overly expensive Seattle housing market, I knew relocating was the only way I was going to fulfill my dreams of palatial living. Unfortunately, the architectural styles of my new town were severely limited between new construction, ranch, a few very expensive midcentury homes, and the alphabet homes.

The Alphabet homes are a series of temporary houses that were built for the Hanford site workers when the nuclear reactor was being built. Each style of home corresponded to a letter in the Alphabet (not all of the letters are represented). Workers were assigned a home-style based on the size of their families. These houses made the basis of the town back in the early 1940’s. While well built, they were intended to be temporary, but instead of being torn down, they were eventually sold to the city or the families living in them, and most are still intact today. To avoid a new build, I focused on a the ‘A’ style home that when converted from its original duplex layout, stood the largest and looked close to a classic colonial, my favorite style house.

While walking my dog, Chloe (RIP) around town I stumbled upon a converted A with an added full-length porch, across from a large park, and a lockbox on the door but no for sale sign. After searching, I find out that it is a foreclosure owned by one of the large banks. After calling on the house every day for a year, let me repeat that every day for a year. It was going to auction! We hired a realtor, that hadn’t heard of the place, but we needed her to get inside. Inside was better than I’d hoped. The previous owner was a contractor and he’d already done all the hard work of moving the kitchen, partially finishing the basement, and creating a master suite out of two rooms and the hall bath.

We had a solid game plan, discussed our offer with our agent, and were confident that since the house had been empty and unlisted for so long, it would be a quiet auction. However, at 6 pm the night before the auction closed, our agent called to say that she had shown OUR HOUSE to another one of her clients and they wanted to make an offer and she was going to represent them!  She referred us to another agent in her firm, which due to the timeline we had to take and then we lost by $50, to our former realtor’s new client.

Battled and bruised, I was done with house hunting, but luckily Chris was now engaged in the hunt. So, I reluctantly kept looking, sort of. I started looking in places I didn’t think would break my heart, Craigslist. Yep, you heard me right, I found our house on Craigslist, 6 hours after it was listed. That house became our home, but when I started my Instagram account to document all the work we were planning on putting into it, it was still just the backup house, to me.