The backstory

One late summer evening, after dinner and a light shower, the girls were playing outside watching a rainbow (really.)  I was clearing dishes and Eric was keeping an eye on them--when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Cora, over by the raspberry plants, helping herself.

If it wasn't for the fact that corner of the house is all of 20 feet from Buckeye parkway and a MAJOR intersection and busy corner, I woudn't have minded--but I 'kind of' panicked.

We started looking for a place with more greenspace.

In September, Eric and I found a great place LITERALLY 2 roads away from us on Copper, on Holton road.  It was a ranch that was in great shape, on 6 acres, but hadn't been updated (not a THING) since they built it in 1960.

Eric and I started getting our hopes up that we could gut the whole thing and really make it ours, but unfortunately the old woman's three grown children wanted to fight over money and woudn't budge off of the EXTREMELY inflated pricetag.

After a few weeks of negotiating and waiting, in late October, we decided that ship had sailed.

We continued our search for a few weeks--but with the holidays rolling around, nothing came up on the radar.  Susan kept looking for us, but everything was either late mid-century with no character, brand new, or on a lot without a single mature tree--something looking at the Holton house really made us think about what we wanted.

In January, one night tooling around on Zillow, I found the Denton house.

I emailed Susan that night and within 24 hours she had the backstory for me.  That she actually used to work with the lady who owned it and that they were trying to (or were) running weddings out of that property and that Susan herself had attended a few parties there.

hmmmm...intrigued...