Highschool Sweethearts Turned Serial Renovators (part I)
At the heart of most good stories is a love story...
Hi! Welcome! We’re kicking off our intro series today with a post about our first home purchase. This post is free (Part II is for our paid subscribers). Lots more to come in Punch List, a renovation story by the Grit and Polish. Enjoy!
Intro series: Part I | Part II | THE house
Cathy, Garrett and Hacker-Pschorr the German Shorthair Pointer at the Wallingford house circa fall 2008
At the heart of most good stories is a love story. And that’s true for The Grit and Polish, too. Cathy and I met in high school, though Cathy would say really it was in middle school. I don’t actually recall this encounter but apparently it involved an already chewed gum wad and a dare… Fast forward 5 years to senior English class where we ended up sitting next to each other for most of the semester. I forgot my silent reading book, a detention-worthy offense in Mr. Hall’s class, so Cathy bailed me out with a dog-eared copy of All’s Quiet on The Western Front. Basically from then on we’ve been a thing.
We’ll dive into more of this backstory later on but for now I’ll skip to when the renovations start. It was Seattle 2008. We’d been married a few years, renting a little duplex in the lovely Wallingford neighborhood while Cathy finished her second degree, this time civil engineering at UW. Just a block from the trail to campus and close by the north shore of Lake Union, we loved Wallingford’s mix of quiet residential surrounded by urban energy. After Cathy graduated into a job at a premier structural engineering firm, we started our search for our first home. The housing bubble had peaked in 2007 and prices were on the slide so we felt like our timing was good. We knew we wanted a fixer, old and charming, and there was no shortage of run down bunglows in the neighborhood! After touring a couple that didn’t work out we found the place we’d been hoping for.
Love at first sight is not a thing for me and homes (or most people, I’m guessing), but for Cathy it was and is. From the moment she walked in the front door she knew. It was a sunny day in August and the large bank of south-facing original windows seemed to let in all the daylight in Seattle. The soaring ceilings and original millwork gave the humble craftsman a bit of unexpected grandeur. And the backyard, though overgrown, had potential as a secret-garden-esque entertaining patio, perfect for intimate evenings around the table with friends.
That’s what Cathy saw.
I saw the leaking roof, the animal smells, shoebox kitchen, wallpapered dungeon basement, and overgrown hedges. Cathy, with her rose-tinted glasses on, dismissed it all as minor imperfections, but as I think back on it now, I’m actually a little surprised a bank loan was even possible for that house!
With our new home, new jobs, and big renovation dreams all spun up we started right away by tearing out the old, smelly carpets and fixing some leaks. We made it through our first drafty winter on the old gas-converted coal furnace and were looking forward to the summer renovation season.
But Spring proved disastrous.
By then the Great Recession was in full swing and Cathy’s new job suddenly became no job. Nine months after buying our first home, the majority of our income vanished overnight and with it any hope of paying the mortgage. Since our purchase, the market had continued to crater so selling wasn’t a very palatable option. We had put every scrap of savings (and borrowed more from family) into the down payment and pushed our debt-to-income to the limit in order to qualify. We were underwater on the house with no savings and no hope of more income coming in anytime soon. Short-sale, foreclosure, bankruptcy. These were all possibilities staring us in the face.
We knew we had taken a risk by stretching our finances so far but luckily (or perhaps foresightfully), we had a plan B…
read more of our intro series here: Part I | Part II | THE house.