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Meet Garden:(thanks google street view)
Garden is our soon-to-be new home. We move Thursday and have big dreams for this house. Dylan's brainstorming blog names today. Our plan is to start a new site where we'll document some of those dreams. Unfortunately "meisterhaus" is taken at wordpress (Sorry blogger, Dylan just loves wordpress) so we're still thinking. Until then, I'll update here. First, a little background on our search.

Since Dylan and I met, we've dreamt of omelets Saturday mornings, woodworking in the garage, a huge garden, cold nights snuggled in front of a fire, and room for a puppy to play. We've always wanted a real home together. A house.
In the middle of my long-term teaching assignment last year, we finally had a steady income, and with the $8k tax credit we thought we might finally be able to buy a house. I started searching online on this site. Constantly. I knew every home for sale in Columbus and the surrounding 30 mile radius that met our initial criteria: 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a fireplace, and a 0.25 acre lot.
Then this September I found the perfect house. "Schoolcraft".
It met our generic criteria, plus it had a privacy fence and a gorgeous, huge covered front porch. We signed up for more information, and a realtor, Erik Hiss, got in touch with us. When we went to look at it in person, I expected fireworks. But we just weren't that excited. We just kind of looked at each other like "is this what it should feel like?" I could imagine us living there. It had everything we were looking for, and the front of the house was beautiful, but we didn't know if it felt like home. So we kept looking.
Erik was great. He looked at dozens of houses with us and listened as we arranged and rearranged our list of priorities (location, yard, fireplace, school district, square footage, price) and helped us determine what we were truly looking for. In the middle of all this we found a really unique, beautiful house and decided to make an offer. "Glen" was a split-level with a wide open floor plan--think open kitchen/dining/living rooms with continuous, gorgeous hardwood floors. The back of the house was mostly glass and doors and overlooked a fenced, wooded lot. I deleted all our pictures of Glen when things didn't work out. As gorgeous as it was, we would have needed to spend a good amount to update the house. Already at the top of our price range, when the seller wouldn't budge much on the price, we let it go and kept looking.
We spent fall and winter going to open houses and continued to develop our priorities. We limited our search to Clintonville and Beechwold, neighboring communities in the heart of Columbus. And then in January I found Garden. And Garden is the one. More on Garden this afternoon. I have packing to do!