Background

My wife Wende and I had been searching for a Victorian home for 15 years before we found this one.  We looked at beach houses, farm houses and town houses in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland.  We finally began to narrow our search for a grand home in a historic community in walking distance to community shopping and restaurants.  It had to be in the right level of dis-repair so I could afford it!

We saw this one before it came up for sale and made contact with the owners after seeing an article about the house in the October 2004 issue of the Middletown Transcript.  Shortly afterward, the home was listed for sale, but it was overpriced.  We would see it now and again over the years and bide our time.

Finally, in January 2007, we learned that the home was heading to foreclosure.  We would have a chance to buy it at Sheriff's sale, but the outstanding mortgages exceeded its real value.  This took us by surprise.  If we wanted this house, we were going to have to act immediately.  We would borrow all the equity from our current home in Newark and add to it a mortgage and credit line on this home.  We would buy it in April 2007 from the bank that bought it at Sheriff's sale and have a clear title.

If anyone has been following the news, this was not a good time in the real estate business to do this kind of thing.  Home prices were falling and credit was tightening.  We had hoped to sell our home in about one month and have enough money to pay off all the loans.  But our home took 8 months to sell!  By the time our home sold, we had lowered the price and spent all our cash on swing loan payments so that we were dead even, not in the cash-rich position to make repairs that I had hoped!