After about a year of browsing listings and visiting a few dozen houses over our regular weekend trips, we finally found a great deal on the perfect little starter home in our favorite city! Even though we currently live in Salt Lake, we wanted to take advantage of low home prices and record low mortgage interest rates and buy before they both increase again. I've been excited about moving back to Portland for years, and we have now made a big step to making that happen!
This house had everything we were looking for and more:
- Easily manageable size for simple living - just under 1000 square feet.
- Several huge windows for lots of natural light.
- Great open floor plan and flow through the house.
- Amazing floor-to-ceiling brick fireplace.
- Private backyard with covered patio, 12 existing garden boxes, established fruit trees, berries, and a very nice chicken coop. All things we thought we'd spend thousands on building and planting ourselves.
- Second house from end on dead end street, so it's very quiet and there's no traffic.
- Location! Great up-and-coming neighborhood just 2 blocks away from restaurants and shops including Lilly Market, the best Asian market in Portland. Same distance to a bus line that runs downtown, and just 10 blocks to the light rail hub that takes you anywhere from Clackamas to Gresham to Hillsboro and just 15 minutes to downtown Portland. Perfect for turning into a rental someday if we'd like to upgrade to something bigger down the line.
We're going to spend this summer taking weekend trips and doing some easy DIY improvements. Before we move anything in, we plan to refinish the wood floors throughout and paint the entire interior. The current colors are terrible and whoever painted last did a very sloppy job. Structurally the house is in excellent condition. The biggest project will be updating the kitchen, but we're very happy that we get to do that because the kitchen is the room where we really want to be able to pick everything out.
Not bad for a super-cheap Housing and Urban Development foreclosure! We almost feel guilty about getting such a good deal. Almost.
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