Despite it happening a full year ago, the first one that got away is still to raw to talk about but here’s the story of the second one that got away.
While scrolling Instagram (I apparently do so for an average of 4 minutes per day), I randomly stumbled upon a super cute and reasonably affordable house for sale in Wilmonton, NC. Andrew was on board to check it out as part of a little road trip. Well by the time we were getting set to go for said road trip, I discovered that of course it had already sold. But! since we already sort of had plans to head that way, I decided to do a quick search to see if there were any other interesting houses for sale that we could take a look at.
Lo and behold, this little lady came up on my search, and at about half of the price of the original reasonably affordable house.
Isn’t she cute?
It turns out she looked slightly different in reality, but we didn’t notice, we were smitten.
After crossing the wrap around porch, you enter into a front hall area. The living room is immediately to the left with its beautiful vinyl floor sticker.
There are two full bathrooms, one of which was quite large, and the other was a pretty tight jack-and-jill. However, it was listed as a 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom, which were hoping would cut down on the list of interested buyers.
The kitchen was updated with stainless appliances, and the whole house was painted what I’m pretty sure is SW Agreeable Gray.
According to easily available records, the house was originally built in 1920, but it appears an addition was added at some point so when you leave the kitchen to go to the back half of the house, you have to climb 4 steps.
How many flooring types have you counted? The listing mentioned the “all new floors”. In addition to one bedroom, one bathroom, and the laundry room, there is also a large living area in the back half of the house.
You can access the attic (great storage space), and backyard. The lot is 0.12 acres, which allows for a pretty big backyard and giant storage building. I don’t have any pictures to show it, but the storage building would be a good contender for Storage Wars.
The Plan
We wanted to turn it into a short-term rental. It’s walkable to downtown Wilmington and the riverfront, but we’d provide bikes to make it even easier to get around. And it’s a 25 minute drive from the beach making for easy beach days.
We’d put a locking solid door between the front and back half of the house. We’d add a kitchenette to the back living area. This way the front and back half could be rented as two separate units or as one. The front half would have two bedrooms with a bathroom between them, but beds or pull out couches could be placed to add sleeping space for four more people. The back half would have one bedroom, and a pull out couch and/or bunks could be added to add sleeping space for up to four more people.
We’d pretty up the yard with furniture and lights and such to make it a nice place to hang out. We’d also plan to eventually replace the storage building or simply update it to accommodate both storage and one more small rental unit. The storage would be for bikes, beach equipment, yard games. It would also provide a place to stash outdoor furniture during storms.
Part of the appeal of this kind of setup is that it could accommodate any any size group. We could stay there ourselves while having the other unit(s) rented out. Or we could invite family and friends to join us.
I was surprised it didn’t sell the day it was listed. And I was really surprised that it wasn’t sold five days later. But as we were getting ready to put in an offer, we found out that it actually did sell in three days, they just hadn’t updated the listing status yet 🙁
But now we’re on the lookout for another potential property in Wilmington.
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