Why We Love Will Someday Love Little Pink House III

I know you're expecting to see pictures of the inside of Little Pink House III today.  But I didn't have time to upload all the pictures.  So instead I'll tell you about why we chose to buy this house.  First let me describe to you what I first thought when I went inside Little Pink House III...

"WHAT A DUMP!  It's exactly what we were looking for!"

Because we have non-standard taste for Utah, we knew it would be next to impossible to find a pre-built house to suit our taste.  And sure enough, both style-wise and layout-wise, we couldn't find anything we liked.  So the option to find a fixer-upper became more and more attractive the longer we looked.  I had no idea how much of a fixer upper our future house would be!

When I tell that you this house is filthy, I can't stress it enough.  It's like 12 grubby toddlers and 20 puppies and 2 college fraternities who all have pet pigs have lived in it for 10 years and no one ever cleaned up ANYTHING.  Every carpet looks like someone was murdered on it.  Every light switch, door handle, and wall is covered with ketchup smears, finger prints, grease, grime and other things I don't want to know about.  There are holes in walls and doors, stickers and writing on most surfaces in the bedrooms.  The kitchen is all banged up, greasy, stinky and icky.   Toilet seats are broken.  Tubs are stained.  The dishwasher looks like fires were set inside it.  NO LIE.  The yard is so overgrown that hardly a window is visible and the grass is all completely dead.  The algae on the pond out back is so thick my daughter thought it was grass and tried to walk across it! 

Why on earth would we want this house, you ask?  BONES.  It has excellent bones!  Great spaces, a few amazing features like the coffered ceiling and the spiral staircase and the huge 2 story tall windows.  Excellent light.  Wonderful potential.  AND it has a big 1/2 acre, west facing lot, on a quiet street WITH a few established trees!  It's in my kids' current school district.  And although we don't know the neighbors yet, about 1/2 the neighborhood was built in the last 5 years, so that bodes well for there being young kids around.  And the price is right.  It's a foreclosure, and with the condition it's in, we are getting it at a price low enough to allow for pretty beefy renovations.

That is all relative, of course, once you start adding up the items that need to be ripped out and replaced:
1 Kitchen
5 bathrooms
1 master closet
2 staircases
20 doors
miles of crown molding
hundreds of yards of carpeting
dozens of awful light fixtures
8 panels of mirrored sliding closet doors
3 garage doors
3 windows
a few horrible pine trees
loads of overgrown weeds and shrubs
2 furnaces, 2 water heaters, 2 air conditioners
a dishwasher, a stove, possibly a fridge and 2 ovens

There's the waterfall/pond to be mucked out, the driveway and back patio to be resurfaced, the sod to be replaced (and undoubtedly a sprinkler system in need of repairs), honestly the list goes on and on and on!  But remember the bones.  The fantastic bones!  And the great spaces.  And the lot.  The lot is key.  So keep the faith.  It's all going to turn out great!  (Right???)