Merry Christmas to Us!

You know, it's been a rough couple of years as renters. There's a lot I haven't minded at all about renting, but when you have two nice rentals sold out from under you and then live above some really lousy landlords for six months, you just decide it's time to look into buying a home. So we did. And discovered that we could do it. And a few days later we went out with an agent to take a look at the Rogers Park neighborhood, an area we really liked before moving here but didn't move into because we didn't find a fabulous school there. So, there we were going back because our research showed us that housing was definitely cheaper there and we like its proximity to the lake, urban feel, and diversity. Oddly, on that fact-finding mission we found a beautiful condo and our agent convinced us that we might be able to make it work even though we had many months left on our lease.

Here we are, five days later, with an agreed-upon contract for that home. I never thought it possible to find a place on the first day out and then negotiate our way into a very generous contract with the sellers 24 hours after making the offer. Our agent was rather shocked, too. And all I can say is that at this point in our housing history, we really deserved a break and I'm glad we got one. Not only did we get it for a good price, but we were able to negotiate a delayed closing date of March 1st and - get this - the sellers are paying for the rest of our rent through the end of our lease! The deal you can get in the middle of winter when the market is soft makes it worth dealing with all of this at Christmastime.

So here are some details for you. It's in southeast Rogers Park. It's a 3 bedroom 3 bath duplex condo in a 1920s 6-unit building. We don't know exact square footage, but it's somewhere between 2,000 and 2,200 so it's quite large. It was gutted and completely rehabbed 7 years ago so everything is very new (appliances, roof, electric, plumbing, etc.) but they preserved some nice vintage details. It's on the first floor (hooray!). The downstairs will be a sort of suite of rooms for the boys - a family room (play room), their bedroom, and a bathroom. Upstairs there's a big living room, kitchen, dining room, sun room, laundry room, master bedroom, 2nd bedroom (our office), and two bathrooms. Plenty of space. We definitely don't have enough furniture, which is great - there's room to grow in this place.

But what I love perhaps best of all is the proximity to beautiful Lake Michigan, which is just half a block away. Our street dead-ends right into the beach. As I told my grandmother in Massachusetts today, "You can take the girl away from the ocean but you can't take the beach away from the girl." Or something like that.

We'll plan to spruce the place up after we close in March and then move in during our spring break in April. We are beyond thrilled - it's the best Christmas gift we could ask for.