By Erin Nieto
When it comes to househunting, I have it down to a science. MLS listings are checked several times a day. I know full well the sequence of numbering so that I can identify what’s come on the market over the course of hours in a day.
709 W. Michigan, Urbana, was nearly Househunting Mom Erin Nieto's dream house.
And one Friday morning during my routine MLS check, I saw an address that made my heart jump: 709 W. Michigan. A house on a double lot with at least four of our older son’s friends within a couple of blocks. In the Leal School district, which, in public school terms, sets the gold standard for education in Champaign-Urbana. Walkable to lovely, lovely Carle Park. Walkable to Downtown Urbana and all of its wonderfulness. Mature landscaping like you wouldn’t believe. Big enough house. Well within our price range.
Needless to say, I got on the phone with our real estate agent pronto to schedule a showing. When she got back to me with a time slot on Saturday, she said that the homeowner was surprised: “Someone wants to look at it already?” he said.
The MLS listing contained only one picture of the front exterior of the house, so I had no real sense of what kind of house I would really be walking into, save for an abstract description.
Let me just say that I am not known for having emotional reactions. I am always reliably composed — game-faced even. So imagine my husband’s surprise at my gasps for air as we walked through this property. From the gorgeous stained glass entryway to the Marshall Studios (or at least very close) tiled kitchen counters to the huge screened-in back patio. The walls were covered in the most gorgeous artwork — the kind that I am likely to fantasize about having on my own walls. Original woodwork intact. The first-floor master suite was an honest-to-gosh master suite, which is rare in houses of her age.
Goosebumps.
My husband could hear my sighs emanating from her rooms. “What?” he asked, expecting to hear criticism.
“I just love this house,” is all I could say.
He’d never heard me say anything like that about a house we were walking through.
When we got home from the showing, I scribbled out little floor plans, cobbled together from my memory of the walk through. This is a sure sign of love. Kind of like scrawling your first name together with the last name of the boy you have a crush on. I just wanted to preserve the memory of that feeling.
But as wonderful as the feeling was, there was rational thinking still to be done. Love with an older house is not always easy. There is more maintenance, for one. And 21st-century living does not always mesh well with a 1930s beauty queen. She wasn’t designed with our cars in mind. Nor wheelchairs. Nor our style of entertaining.
And while we were hard at work on this rational thinking, on crossing our “t’s” and dotting our “i’s” and trying to decide whether this could be the one, she disappeared from the market. I had been going back daily to the MLS listing to see if more photos had been posted, and suddenly she was just gone. It was Wednesday. Just five days after she was listed.
Hoping this could be some kind of mistake, I drove by.
“Sale Pending,” the sign now read. Ouch. That really hurt.
My sources tell me that she was sold to a couple who had also been searching for the perfect house, and searching even longer than we had been, waiting for just the right property to come to market, and for them, this was it. Knowing that gives me some relief, though I’m still not quite over it. Even though I can’t be sure that we would have made the decision to buy it, I feel as if some part of myself had taken up residence there during that walk though, and I never got the opportunity to put that feeling to rest.
This weekend, however, there will be a public estate sale at the house, and I will have my chance at closure. To finally do that second walk through that I had desperately wanted, and say goodbye. And let the search resume.
Erin Nieto has lived in Champaign-Urbana for nearly all of her life, and heads Erin S. Nieto Fine Art Appraisal in addition to being a busy mom of two. More of her essays on motherhood and culture can be found at www.cheapisexpensive.net.
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NO!!! That is MY dream house, Erin! I always admire it when we drive down that street and was also surprised it got snatched up so quickly. You never know though, sometimes sales fall through.
Thanks for the mention of the estate sale, I am definitely going to check it out since I’ve never been inside.
You can console yourself with the knowledge that losing out on that house means the next time it rains really hard you won’t have to go downstairs and suck the water out of its basement — damp basements are the norm over there. When I was house hunting I wasn’t even able to go downstairs in some of the houses. Also, Leal is a good school, but so is Yankee Ridge. They were my top two schools when we were house hunting, and I went with Yankee Ridge because my allergies simply could not tolerate the state street neighborhood. I have no regrets.
I’m enjoying your columns because I see so many similarities with our situation. We, too, are moving back in town from out in the country for many of the same reasons. I too wanted the perfect older home in the established neighborhood. However, my husband was demanding a nice garage and a nice basement. As you know, this is hard to find in those neighborhoods. So we ended up buying in an area I had never planned to even though a major plus is that it is walking distance to Barkstall. At first I felt like I had “sold out,” but there are so many things I like about a modern house after all that I am excited about it now (we move in a couple of weeks). So when you do find your perfect home I will be happy for you but also slightly jealous!! I will enjoy reading about your journey too. What I did re-learn is that house-buying always involves some compromises. Good luck!
Make sure you are pre-approved for a mortgage, if you aren’t already, so you can move more quickly next time. When we found our dream home (also in an older neighborhood, a mile from Bottenfield and within walking/biking distance of three different parks), it went on the market on a Friday, we saw it on Saturday, went to an open house on Sunday to see it again, and made an offer that night. Great houses will go fast, so you gotta be ready to make a decision fast if you see a house that you love. Good luck! We’ve been living in our house for a year now, and it’s sometimes challenging to have an older home (water in the basement? yes!), but it’s a great house, and we plan to enjoy it for many, many years.
I sooo feel your pain!
That is a wonderful neighborhood!
Kerry at housetalkn.blogspot.com