Enrique has an agent, Annika, that he works with that buys houses that are the dump of the neighborhood, fixes them up, while living there, then sells them once they're livable and beautiful again. Somehow she has Enrique convinced that we can do it.
So he's gone from only moving one more time in his lifetime to moving at least 3-5 more times. So, here we go on a journey of finding the perfect dump house to fix up nice and sell in about 2-3 years. We'll see, I really don't like the thought of it but Enrique seems so at ease about it, so we're rolling with it but it does feel like this is what we should be doing......so here we go......
Our realtor, Annika, took me out to look at houses, all shortsales, foreclosures or bank owned properties. We looked at many in Kaysville and I was feeling a bit discouraged and not impressed with all these houses in such need of repair. I had a hard time looking past what they are now to what they can be. However, Annika helped me get past that a lot. She would tell me the things that she would do, keep, get rid of, redo, little tricks for each place. Then I started feeling more at ease with it all.
We didn't want to look outside of Kaysville/Fruit Heights, but she took me to a property just over the boarder into Layton, just off 89. As soon as I walked in (Mutton Hollow house), it felt right. It needs major work, thus the very low price, but I just loved it instantly. It was hard to look past the stuff that the current owners had been hoarding there for years but it was beautiful.
The next night, we went back with Quique and the kids. Everyone really liked it a lot. We went home, talked about it. We decided to get the ball rolling. So we called the loan officer, even though it was 4th of July, we were on our way to Seth's house for the celebrations even. We filled out the paper work. The next day we were approved. Sunday we prayed and fasted about it. We went to the ward there, walked the neighborhood and felt very strongly we needed to make an offer. Monday morning we did.
We didn't hear back by the deadline so we were a bit distraught. 6 days went past and still nothing. Our realtor took us to see more houses that Saturday, both in Layton close to 89. The one was absolutely beautiful and huge. It was everything we wanted in a prebuild and close to what we wanted to build ourselves. There wasn't much wrong with it. The current owners took care of it and loved it, even though they were loosing it to the bank. So, we did the same thing. Prayed and fasted, walked the neighborhood, talked to some great people, and we felt we needed to move forward with this house (the big house).
We were so torn about making an offer or not because how sure we were on the Mutton Hollow house. Then they told me the process and how slow it is. So we had just decided to make an offer late Sunday evening. Just then we got an email from Annika telling us that the Mutton Hollow house accepted our offer.....great, now what do we do? We still put the offer in on the big beautiful house. We were just a few hours short of being the first offer. We ended up being the back up offer to that house, which was pretty near impossible we'd get it. I would day dream about it all the time and how perfect it would be for our family when we had teenagers but we don't so that was a sad reality to that house. It was perfect for a family with teenagers, would have been great now too but too far out of our grasp. So we mainly focused back on the Mutton Hollow house, all the while, Annika is still sending new info for all these different houses.
It was so hard to get any info out of the Mutton Hollow seller's agent, poor Annika definitely had her work cut out for her. We ended up finding out the people had 17 leans against their house and had to pay $1500 immediately and they were refusing to pay. So it was being stalled big time.
In the mean time, Annika came across a house that went up for auction for 1 day only. She managed to get us in to see it that day. Dave went with me to see the house. He seemed to really like it, me on the other hand, I didn't really care for it, mainly because of the layout, it's a multilevel. I took Quique back after and we got in. He really liked it. It was a bargain price too. So at 11:00pm we finally got a hold of Annika to ask her to put an offer for us. She said they would except offers until 10am the next morning.
She got all the paper work together and put the offer in about 8am, Aug 14th. She said it would take a while to find out who got it. Enrique offered a lower price than what they were asking. We found out at 9am the following day, Aug 15th, that they accepted our offer......what???????!!!!!!! What in the world to we do?
In the mean time, we put our house up for sale in Kaysville. We had a ton of interest and activity. We tried to sell it for a month on our own, because we weren't in a rush to sell because we knew the Mutton Hollow house would be slow. But after our offer was excepted for the Layton house, we decided to list it with Annika so we could sell it faster.
It was bad timing to put it on the market but we had to do it anyway. It was labor day weekend and school had just started. We had a lot of activity but then it all just about stopped. We had a few showings a week and that was it. We were just not sure if we should continue selling/moving or not. Enrique was about to take it off the market that day but we went to the temple that night.
We had many answers to our prayers that night at the temple. We decided to continue forward with the purchase of the Layton home and possibly rent the house if it didn't sell quickly. We were seeing mountains move. It was simply miraculous! We were just over come with such gratitude and joy for what was happening and the beautiful way it all happened. So we will continue with faith and trust in the Lord!
