Welcome to our world

Ive been posting on Facebook for awhile about our home remodel project: it is time to get serious and move it onto a longer forum where I can explain my cryptic posts.

I'll tell the story throughout the blog, but here are the basics: In April 2009, we decided to move to Illinois for jobs at Northwestern University from beautiful Seattle WA. We had completed a remodel in 2007 that we loved. After our wonderful friends and neighbors, it was the hardest thing to leave in Seattle. As Reed noted, we get to keep the friends--the house we never get to have again. So we knew we wanted to find a special place to live in Illinois: near NU, good schools, near good natural areas and near the train for those schoolday trips to the Art Institute.
We looked and looked and in June 2009, with our move date of August 1 looming, we still had not found a house. July rolled around, and still no dice. We decided that Reed should go back and look, one last time, for rentals and potential purchases.

At some point in June our agent told us about this house she had heard about that was in an estate that we might be interested in. Reed saw it in July, and went back three times that week to mull it over. It was the family home of an architect named J. Marion Gutnayer, who passed away at 95 in 2005. His wife Alice, a high school French teacher, passed in 2007, and the house had been sitting empty, unheated and full of most of their possessions, for the past few years.

Reed made an offer and we purchased the house from the estate while we were moving: I don't remember clearly, but I do remember reviewing terms at Gordon Ranch in Montana, so it must have been in early August 2009. I did not see the house in person before we bought it. Having completed our remodel in Seattle together, I trusted him.