I would imagine that anywhere in the world, at anytime throughout history, you could gather a group of married ladies together to ask them what surprises they received after the wedding day and they would all have an answer. I would like to think for all of us there has been at least one thing that wasn't what we expected, or that took us by surprise. For me, it was the living situation. While I understood that part of getting married was living with your husband, I hadn't thought through losing my wonderful perfect little girly apartment and getting dumped right in the middle of a bachelor pad. For the first time in my life, I had to share every room in a house with another person! And, that person is a boy! (I still completely agree with my grandmother that boys have cooties.)
Johnie kept his apartment clean, and it wasn't a bad apartment. It just wasn't my apartment. It was filled with his no sense of style stuff, and was smaller and more expensive than my place had been. I quickly set about changing it, but I definitely wanted a different, and bigger, space. I was pushing for a two bedroom apartment. Johnie wanted to make the leap to home ownership. I was reluctant. Mainly because I felt like buying a house was planting roots in Kansas. When I first moved to Wichita, my main goal was moving back to Kentucky as quickly as possible. I was against anything that might keep us in Kansas longer than necessary. Despite it's flat, barren dullness, it didn't take long for the entertaining diversions (having the second most restaurants per capita than any other city in the nation, for example) and wonderful people to grow on me. I knew I could be out here indefinitely, so I decided to start having the full experience. I agreed to meet with a realtor, a friend of Johnie's willing to find us the perfect place.
As is our style, Johnie wanted a new home, a large home, an expensive home. We looked at model homes and considered homes that would have maxed out our loan approval. I wasn't working then, and Johnie was still a field technician, so my budget conciousness motivated me to look less at the most home we could get, and more at what homes we could comfortably afford. We couldn't comfortably afford much, so I wasn't really open to homes more than $75,000. I began scouring the internet for possibilities. While Johnie was ready for a four or five bedroom, I was content with only two. There were a lot of possibilities, and while he was drawn toward the more large and extravagant homes, I prefered small and cozy (along with their price tags). There were a lot of different options available.
One morning I came across one little house that I thought would be perfect for us. It was painted light blue. It had actually been flipped, so everything inside the house was brand new. New laminate flooring, freshly painted walls, new heating and air, new appliances. It was a very small two bedroom, but the pictures of each of the rooms just sparkled. The tiny, tiny asking price of only $35,000 appealed to me too. I told Johnie about the house. He thought it was too small. I kept bugging him about it. One day he asked where it was. When I told him, he said he thought it wasn't in the best neighborhood. Day after day I would go back to the website to check on this little house, and I would talk to Johnie about how much I loved it and how I thought it was perfect for us. He kept shooting me down.
I began to get really frustrated with him and told him so. I thought he wasn't giving this house a chance just because it wasn't in a subdivision and wasn't several bedrooms. I told him he only wanted a house that we would be stuck in because we wouldn't have any money left after paying the mortgage. After about a week or so of this, he finally agreed to go look at the house with me. I was ecstatic. I pulled up the website and retrieved the address. From that moment on, I chattered on and on about how I knew this was the perfect house for us, and he would think so too when he saw it. I talked about how fast we could pay off the small mortgage for the house. How that it might even be an outreach opportunity if we weren't in the best neighborhood - maybe we could help our neighbors. He quietly drove, I'm still not sure whether or not he was listening.
When we turned off the highway into the neighborhood, I was taken a little aback. It was a bit more seedy than I had anticipated. I wasn't ready to be deterred though. "Yeah, so you were right. I guess it's not the best neighborhood, but I still think this will be a good opportunity. And, just because people are poor doesn't mean they are criminals. I was probably more poor growing up than some of these people, and we weren't bad neighbors. Look over there," I pointed to a house, "They keep their house up nice." We drove closer to the address of our perfect little house. Things began looking worse. I became quieter.
When we reached the road the house was on, we also reached the end of the pavement. Being from the country, I am completely accustomed to unpaved roads. Unpaved streets in the middle of a city are a completely different experience! "So, it's on this street?" I asked quietly. Johnie affirmed my question. I wasn't ready to say it out loud because it might mean defeat and I hadn't actually seen the house yet, but I was unsure whether or not I would feel safe on this road by myself.
I was hopeful we would return to pavement before we reached the house. During the days when Johnie was ignoring my monologues about the little blue bungalow, I was fixating on it. The more I looked at it's listing, and the more I looked at other listings, the more convinced I became that this was definitely the perfect house for us. I knew my only obstacle was getting Johnie to seriously consider it. By driving to look at it, he was seriously considering it. I knew he was going to be surprised by how nice it was, I knew everything was going to work out. I was so happy and proud of myself for being open-minded enough to find this little gem for us!
As Johnie continued to drive, the back of a little blue house came into view. My heart sank. I had looked at the listing enough to know this was the house. The pictures hadn't shown the "yard:" reaching only about two or three feet out all the way around the house and nothing but sand/dirt. A final nail in the coffin of my dream came when we reached the side of the house. That nail also held a piece of plywood presumably over a window. Spraypainted in red was the following:
"Dear theif [sic], All of the copper has been taken. There is nothing left to steal."
The plywood, nor the letter, were also not mentioned or shown in the listing, either! I felt horrible, not only was I wrong and Johnie right, but I looked like an idiot for talking on and on and on about a wonderful little house that had letters to criminals instead of windows, in an extremely questionable part of town. And, now I was completely back at square one. I had talked up this house, and talked down all the other houses, so much that I felt it nearly impossible to begin the house hunt once more. We laugh at this story now every time we think about it. I cried about it that evening. Instead of telling me he told me so, Johnie just comforted me, reassured me we would find a house we both loved, and took me to Old Chicago to cheer me up.
I called about a few other houses, and even went to look at some with our realtor with no luck. Our realtor planned a day of showings for us on one of Johnie's days off. We just ran across our notes from that day a couple weeks ago as we were preparing to put the house we ultimately chose back on the market once more. While I have not enjoyed the selling process so far, and am not really all that excited to leave a house that I absolutely love in the first place, I do look forward to getting to look for another perfect house in Kentucky.
I had fun with the house hunting process that day. I do enjoy looking at houses, whether or not I'm interested in buying them. This day I gave each house a nickname so that we would be able to remember each one and the details about it at the end of the day. We visited crazy lady's house. It was a spacious three bedroom with a partially finished basement and detached two car garage at the top of my price range. Crazy lady had some crazy stuff going on including bright blue carpet in the living room, a randomly placed refrigerator that you had to stand on a set of stairs to open, a shower head in the middle of an unfinished part of the basement, a pole like those used for dancing in the middle of the finished part of the basement, and several other questionable things throughout.
We also visited serial killer's house, named because of a room that had been added on to the house that featured more than 10 of those really big electrical sockets that you plug things like dryers and freezers into. We concluded the room could have been used for no other purpose than to house multiple freezers to store dead bodies in, especially since the rest of the house had a bad vibe and gave us the creeps.
I wrote on the listing sheet for the house we ultimately chose "our perfect house." It wasn't perfect, but it was love at first sight. My boss back in Richmond lived and worked in an older home built in the early 1900s. It was then that I fell in love with older homes in general - their hardwood floors, their character, their history. This house was built in 1923. It still had all of the original doors, including skeleton key locks, and some beautiful woodwork, built in bookshelves, and a fireplace. The kitchen was huge, as were the bedrooms, and although unfinished, it had a basement (I was still nervous about Kansas tornadoes at this point). The bathroom was straight from the 70s, but it was clean, and the heating and air hailed from the same era (although they still worked). I was disappointed by the lack of a dishwasher, and a bit nervous about living on a main street in Wichita, but I took the advice of friends from church and called my would-be neighbors were we to purchase the house.
I talked to several neighbors. For the most part they were elderly and had lived on this block for many years. It was difficult for me to learn much about their living situation in this area because most all of them wanted to interview their possible neighbor. They seemed concerned that Johnie and I were so young and without kids (but with a dog), but all were relieved when I answered yes to their very straightforward question "so, are you married?" The fact that there was a park, a library, a grocery store, and the company Johnie worked for in less than a five minute walk, coupled with overly concerned neighbors, was enough to outweigh my concerns. We decided to buy the little house - with a warranty on the old heating and air.
This house has been an acquired taste for Johnie. He has loved it's character, but always dreamed of something bigger. Even now, as I drove away from the house crying when the realtors were coming over to look at it, Johnie had been trying to convince me to put my home on the market even if we weren't moving to Kentucky. I was unwilling to budge and had conceded to finishing the attic as quickly as possible.
For me, the love at first sight has only grown over the last four years. I feel like we've made a great house even better by updating the kitchen and bath. I want so badly just to pick this place up and move it to Kentucky with us. But, I know that just as I loved my apartment on Keeneland and left it only to find this house that I have grown to love even more, I'll find another house in Kentucky that will be the best yet. I'm thankful for this little yellow bungalow on Hydraulic where Johnie and I celebrated our first Christmas, where we celebrated new jobs and promotions, where we had fun times with friends and family, and where our love for one another has continued to deepen and mature. For all the horror stories some couples have about their first place, and despite the funny story that could have come from a quirky sub-par house, I'm glad we have this little place to always call our first home. I think we will always remember it fondly.
