Bethany Kohoutek, Boonie, and Strummer
1913 American Foursquare, approximately 1,700 square feet
Des Moines, Iowa

We scored our first home via Craigslist. It was listed as a foreclosure property that had been empty for six months, but something about its lovely (though sagging) front porch and graceful (though rickety) open staircase appealed to us. The house sits in a vibrant, diverse, and the convenient-to-everything (including my office and downtown Des Moines) Drake Park neighborhood that we love. And it didn’t hurt that the list price was thousands lower than the other homes we’d been touring, which was probably why our real estate agent was hesitant to let us inside. We weren’t sure whether that was because she knew her commission would be puny, or she really believed what she told us: that foreclosure homes are risky business, rife with red flags. When private home-owners sell a house, they’re obligated to tell you honestly what’s wrong with it. When a massive bank in New Jersey sells a home it inherited in a bundle with hundreds of other defaulted mortgages, it has no idea what shape the home is in and, frankly, it doesn’t care.

The 1913 home needed a lot of work. Windows were old and hardly did a thing to keep our expensive heat inside where we wanted it. Someone thought it would be a good idea to paint the porch red; the house is green, so unless you deliver presents on December 25, that’s just not cool. The landscaping needed (and still needs) work. But our two inspectors agreed the home was structurally sound. And we fell in love with the charming details: the adorable backyard, the plate rail in the dining room, the wide crown molding framing elegant double doorways.

We closed on our home two months after touring it and two weeks after discovering I was pregnant with our first baby. Which was convenient for me; having a bun in the oven is a hall pass out of the nastiest parts of a home re-model: Boonie got stuck with pulling up icky carpeting, installing floors, and cleaning the basement, while I shopped Craigslist for baby-room bargains. Sense a pattern here?

See page 2 for tips on buying a foreclosure.