Woo Hoo HOUSE!

Our real estate agent just called a few minutes ago with the news that the lienholder has accepted our offer and we now have a contract for a house!

We didn't want to publicize it too much since it was a short sale (meaning the current owners are selling it for less than they owe on their mortgage, so the bank has to agree to take a haircut rather than go to the trouble of foreclosing), and short sales famously take forever and maybe never happen.

But ours did, so by early September sometime we will officially be homeowners! (And then we can get lots of junk mail aimed at us. Hooray.)

Jen's post is here. Photos (ours (blurry) and MLS (old)) are here.

I was a little trepidatious about moving to West Seattle -- the address is 8836 18th Ave. SW, which puts it in South Delridge -- but I'm getting more sold on the neighborhood. And it's really close to shopping and buses -- and the RNPSes.

Right. I'm going to go off to lunch and bounce around now.

Wheee!

So, about the house

The house is, um, quirky. As I said to Jen, it's like it was built eighty years ago and people have been poking it with a stick ever since.

The original 720 sf cottage (the gabled part) was built in 1930. It has a full basement, but I suspect that we'll find a bricked-up external access, since I can't figure out where the stairs down could have gone inside the building envelope.

It has a ~500 sf addition (the flat-roofed part) built, I believe, sometime in the '40s. The stairs down were cut into the original living room, so they make the living room kind of weird.

The kitchen and original dining area were updated, probably in the early '80s, when I'll bet they added the wall of cabinets and the island with the range top.

The basement is half-finished. Unfortunately, it looks like the half they did they did wrong and without permits, so we'll be ripping it all out and starting over (except for the toilet and sink).

It's on a double lot (9600 sf/0.22 acres), with a garage (kinda falling down) and a big shed (also kinda falling down). There's three cars worth of off-street parking inside the encompassing chain-link fence. There's a gazebo foundation -- we're not sure whether there was a gazebo that was knocked down, or they never finished the project.

It's going to need a few repairs right off the bat, and we're planning on day one to basically gut the first floor bathroom to cut out all the moisture damage and do it right (and waterproof). And then there'll be ripping out all the old tongue-and-groove paneling in the original cottage, and dressing up the fireplace, and finishing the basement, and refinishing the kitchen cabinets and maybe replacing the doors, and putting in a patio, and building the gazebo (maybe with hot tub), and knocking down the shed and garage and rebuilding them properly, and then ... well, you get the picture. We're going to be working on this for a long time.