Le Chateau Ghetto

The summer I was 17 my parents decided it was time to buy a home. Thus began an obsession. We must have gone through hundreds of model homes that summer. Each one I would pick a room to make mine (I'd never had my own room before) and I decided how I was going to decorate it and how cool I would look. My parents bought a fixer upper instead of the new home and I didn't really get to do anything to it. My Mother believes that all walls should be WHITE!
So instead I dreamt of the day that I would buy my own home and get to decorate the whole house. A year after I was married my husband C and I were getting tons of pressure about buying a house. It was the height of the market and neither of us felt comfortable with the idea but we caved to pressure and got pre-qualified. As I said it was the height of the market and we were poor newlyweds. We qualified for $180,000 which then wasn't much. I fell in love with a sleek condo-conversion for $175k but gratefully now was talked out of it by my mother. C and I got a hold of a realtor that let us look through the MLS website by ourselves and we stumbled onto 2 real possibilities.


    Option A was a 2 bedroom townhouse with French balconies off both bedrooms. One balcony overlooked beautiful Sunrise Mountain and the other was a breathtaking view of the whole Las Vegas Valley.


   Option B was a manufactured home with three bedrooms a nice yard and absolutely no AIR CONDITIONING!


  We choose option A...




We were idiots!


Option A was in foreclosure and the owners were pissed! We had the house inspected and it was surprisingly in need of very little work.We were able to close 3 days before the house went up for auction and being first time buyers we didn't think to make sure the owners had moved out before we took possession of the house. They refused to surrender the keys and we had to have our Realtor open the house for us and that night we replaced the door locks. It was dark and we could not tell the damage that the old owners had done as they moved out.


Just a sneak peek into what lay before us in the next 5 years.


In the next few posts I will begin to describe how our little townhouse received it's name Le Chateau Ghetto! I hope this blog will do a few things.


I want to vent some frustration with humor (I hope)..


I want to let other people with fixer uppers in over their heads know they are not alone.


Most importantly I want to teach others the things I have learned, the things I wish I had known, and how to avoid the stupid mistakes C and I have made.


I hope you join me for my next post:  Mold and the Kitchen a Tasty Treat....