The Story Of Our Vermont Cabin
Would you ever put a binding offer on a house without seeing it first? Without stepping foot in the door? We did just that in 2020 we purchased a little cabin near a ski resort in Vermont. The process of buying a home is crazy enough, but in 2020 in Vermont you were only allowed to see the inside of a home if you had an actual offer on the property. You could do a FaceTime walkthrough with your agent, but you couldn’t step foot in your potential investment until you had already made an actual binding offer. Couple that with the crazy competitive real estate market and we realized that we were in fact nutso.
But if you know us at all we thrive on crazy. Like decide to drive from Virginia to Quebec in the next few days crazy. “Hey kids tell your teachers tomorrow you’ll be out for a few days because we are going to Canada.”
The Listing
The cabin came on the market on a Thursday afternoon and by Friday morning our rockstar real estate agent had the key and scheduled us for the first virtual walk through. A little ski cabin, about seven minutes from the slopes. We followed him along through the rooms and from what we could tell, we loved it. We told our agent that we were very interested and we would like to talk about an offer.
To our surprise, there were already multiple offers on the house. We had already lost in bidding wars on a couple of other properties in town and we were heading down that road again. We wrote a letter to the owners, attached pictures of our smiling children and waived our right to see it in person before the home inspection. To our surprise, the seller’s accepted our offer and we were that much closer to the finish line.
The Home Inspection
A few weeks later we drove up to Vermont for the home inspection. And to see the cabin for the first time. In order for our offer to be more competitive we agreed not to require any repairs with a value of less than a certain dollar amount. Basically, if we hated the house, but there was nothing really wrong with it, we were stuck. As we drove from the hotel to the cabin I kept thinking, “I can’t believe we are buying a house that we haven’t actually seen yet.”
The good news is, we absolutely loved it and there was nothing earth shattering in the home inspection. PHEW! It has some things we’d like to change and make our own, but we love it none-the-less.
Settling Into The Cabin
We arrived up in Ludlow, Vermont the weekend they received over four feet of snow. With everyone in our family still attending school and meetings virtually, we were able to stay up in Vermont for a few months and start making the cabin ours. We will share some of our projects that we are working on along the way. As ya’ll know, those magic room transformations you see all over Instagram actually take more than three seconds, three days, three weeks, heck most of ours have taken over three months.
Check out some of the cabin projects we’ve started Medicine Cabinet, Painting Wood Paneling, Bathroom Privacy Film.