90s22 Buying a House

Housing prices in Iowa City have always been high. We wondered if it would ever even be a possibility for us. The president of a local bank had told us repeatedly that when we were ready we should come and see him. The local realtor who found us the condo to rent kept encouraging us to look around.

We still owned our house in Mt. Pleasant and thought we would have to sell it before we could buy in Iowa City. We thought we needed to get a good price for it in order to be able to buy anything in Iowa City.

We began to think the only possibility was a small house without a garage. We had seen some that might be possibilities. One day the realtor contacted us and showed Becky a house on the south side of town. She was very impressed and so I went to see it with her.

The owner wanted to move the house quickly and the realtor told us he would wave his fee in order to help us out. The bank encouraged use to go ahead with it and said they would be Ok waiting for our other house to sell. We made an offer and the seller accepted. We were overjoyed!

The sellers had purchased a nearby house and had priced their house to sell quickly. They tried to back out of it just before closing but the realtor held them to the agreement. I think they realized they could have gotten more out of the house if they had just waited. We paid $98,000 for it.

We moved into the house early in September of 1994. Becky moved quite a bit of our stuff and after school several Longfellow staff members helped us move everything else. It was pretty much all done in a couple hours and we took everyone to dinner at La Casa as a way of thanking them for their help.

We had new appliances from Best Buy and found a king size bed at a yard sale. The house was a four-bedroom ranch with an unfinished basement except for a couple rooms. It was a house we never dreamed we would have.

Becky turned one bedroom into her sewing room and we turned another one into an office. Becky spent a lot of her time making the house a home. I was intrigued about the potential of the basement. It had a large area that could be a family room. It had another room that could be a non-conforming bedroom, an unfinished bathroom that the previous owner had already purchased everything to finish, a small finished bedroom, a laundry room, and a workshop that had already been wired for power tools.

After living in the small apartment for a year we felt like we now had some space. We had a nice yard with plenty of room in the back for a garden. The only drawback to the house was that it had a single car garage, which to us was far better than no garage at all.