When we started to look for houses in Spokane we have a some pretty defining criteria on our “must have” list. The most important thing on our list was to have space. We had just come from Seattle, with its small lot sizes and no privacy (literally are neighbors looked in on us). So we wanted some land so that we could do our own thing without the judging glare of other people. I’m not talking about living 100 miles from civilization–we just wanted a couple acres. The other thing on our “must have” list was to have a home with character. We didn’t want a cookie cutter home.

With those two things in mind we set off to Spokane with our family of seven (the twins were 1 week old) in search of our forever home. We spent two days looking at properties, most were a lot of land with really horrible houses, or nice homes with land that was not so great. So when we first drove up to our now home we knew right away that it was the home for us…we were meant to live here. The only problem, it was on the market. Infact, we had no idea who it belonged to. It had gone into foreclosure, but we didn’t know which bank currently owned it. We told our realtor without even stepping foot inside that we wanted to make an offer. He found out who owned it, and we put in an offer. And they wouldn’t even look at it. At this point we had stopped looking at any other houses, and were set on Florence becoming our home. In June (we found her in April) the bank finally put her on the market and we immediately put in an offer. The only problem was that so did someone else. So we put in an offer of $45K over asking which got accepted! The competing offer we later found out was only $5K less then ours! It took another 4 months to close on the house because of septic issues and a fold that happened in the guest house causing mold through out. But finally in October we drove up to our new house ready for a new adventure!