My home in a different timeline.

I could have lived here.  Life would have been so much different.

I was cleaning up my hard-drive, and found an offer I had submitted to purchase this house. Having the offer letter indicates it was a “For sale, by owner” listing.  I just googled the house.

It was the summer of 2003, I was teaching at Normandy and living at Dover Farms Apartments in North Royalton.  I always liked brick bungalows, so this house looked good. 

I offered $141,000.  They wisely rejected the offer, and sold the house a few months later for $156,000.  Seven years later, the new owners sold the house for $158,000.  Now, fifteen years after that, the house has almost doubled in value, Zillow putting it at $296,000.  That’s the market.

I like that realty listings never go away.

The house has 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1700 sq ft and sits on an acre.  It was built in 1941, which is odd, because they should have been preparing for World War II.  The 2003 sellers had purchased the house in 1975.

Zillow doesn’t say when the photos were taken, but the kitchen was probably ruined by the 2003 buyers.

It’s a nice house that needed some renovations.  The garage is detached, and possibly too horrible to show in any photos.

Had my offer been accepted, the last 20 years would have been very different.  No quad, no wood-burning stove, no log splitter, no fruit trees, no bees and no deer hunting.

When I met my friend Joe, I lived in my current compound.  Everything I just mentioned, Joe also started doing, then overdoing.  Joe is an endless source of bad ideas. We might not have done much, or any of that.

I screw around on projects all the time.  That house doesn’t lend itself to screwing around, but pushes the owner to be regular.  I would have been fine, but it’s good that my offer was rejected.