The Nightmare on Elmwood

When Carlos and I first bought our house, we would always get the question, “how much did your house cost?!”. Underlying questions - “are you guys crazy”, “it it worth the piece of crap that it is”, and “is it worth me getting into that kind of project for myself?” Well, I will say this, fixer uppers are absolutely NOT for everybody. My sister, Rebeca, asked the other day in a conversation about how OVER I was waiting for our many-times-pushed-back-move-in date, “if you could go back, would you do it all over again?” My answer, “yes, but differently”, AKA I’d have enough money to hire a contractor, get him/her on a schedule, and still be able to have a normal life.

Anyway, we aren’t made of money and we didn’t think it’d take this long, so we did it and I’m absolutely glad that we did.

In April 2018, 3 months away from the end of our lease at our once in a lifetime apartment, we were at the point of making big girl/boy moves. We had to decide whether to buy a house, rent a house, etc. We weren’t financially ready for a down payment, so we were leaning toward renting a house for a year and saving in the meantime. Well, that all changed when I got an email from my school district.

The city of Kansas City, MO, specifically the Land Bank of Kansas City, had gathered 25 properties that they were wanting to sell to public servants of the community - teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc. I liked this for several reasons: 1. I think that public servants that serve the community they live in can relate more to the people they serve and 2. I was a public servant and could take advantage of this deal.

If you look closely, we paid a whopping $192 for the house. Yes, that’s it. Oh, and also lots of time, sweat, tears, blood, discouragement, regret, etc.

Best decision ever.

Super naive of us… LOL

The agreement was - we take it off the hands of the city, we have one year to repair it, and must live in it for two years afterwards. After three years, we could do what we want with it. Our plan was to make it our forever home. However, $200 meant that we had our work cut out for us.

The pictures below will show you what a circus it was when we bought it. Looking back at these pictures… I’m shaking my head. I can’t believe we did this! 2 years ago, though, it felt right. It was in the exact neighborhood Carlos grew up in (right across the street from his grandma’s house!), it was in one of the neighborhoods we’d consider making our forever home, and it only cost $200! Many people in our families work in jobs that could support us with the house - Carlos’ dad works for a drywall company, our brother-in-law had roofing experience, my dad plumbing, flooring, etc., our sister-in-law works for a window company. With the resources we had access to, we knew it’d provide us with some support to get started on the work.

Most importantly and most impactful, Carlos’ dad agreed to help us, as in, boots on the ground, every evening spent at our house help. It was the cherry on top that made the goal attainable.

Again, looking back, we absolutely did NOT realize that the project would take us over two years to make it live-able. We were naive (and if you’ve done the math, non-compliant to our contract’s time constraints). It’s August 2020 and we are just now seeing a realistic move-in date in about a month. Would we do it again if we were 2 years younger, knew 2 years less worth of knowledge? Yup! LOL

I’ll write lots more about our decision to work on this project and the reality of what it took in the future. Stay tuned! :)

(click to look through the pictures)