After what seemed like an eternity in Corpus Christi, Texas,
Dan became a Designated Naval Aviator and we received our marching orders to
finish training in Jacksonville, FL. Now at the time, neither of us knew
anything about Jacksonville, other than it’s the home of the Jaguars. Yay, we
get to trade the Falcons for the Jags! Not an upward movement, but we’ll take
it. And we certainly did not anticipate falling in love with the city in such a
short time span.
The way the P3 world works after training, is you can go to
1 of 3 places; Kaneohe Hawaii, Whidbey Island Washington, or stay here in JAX.
After some VERY VERY long weeks of waiting, filled with trepidation and
sleepless nights, I finally got a text from a few of the other wives of Dan’s
coworkers asking if we knew our orders… Wait, they are in? Well they were, only
Dan was flying at the time… How convenient! So about 3 texts later saying “you
call me first when you land,” he finally touched down and called and we FINALLY
heard those magic words: “You got your 1st pick.”
Which all leads us to where we are now—restoring our old
1924 American Foursquare 3 bedroom 1.5 bathroom house with 2,000 sq feet in the
historic district of Jacksonville known as Avondale. Back in July I woke up early one morning like
I always do, and we had been keeping up with the real estate in the area,
knowing if we got orders to stay we would like to purchase a house within
Avondale. Well that morning was particularly special. A house that I first saw
while we were back in TX but had gone off the market had been re-listed. It was
like Christmas morning in the Baker household, for me at least! I am pretty
sure Dan was more alarmed at how excited I was than his excitement towards the
house. But that didn’t matter, the
contract had fallen through, and I was determined to talk to our realtor and
see that house within that week!
The funny thing was that 2 nights before the listing, we
were outside in the downpour from Debbie that left our streets flooded and 11
cars floating into our neighbors front yards, drinking with Belinda, our
realtor who is also our next door neighbor, saying “we are just looking right
now, but we will let you know when we might be ready to look at something.”
Little did we know it would be later that week!
Now do not worry, I have not forgotten that the reason the
house was back on the market was because the contract fell though. In fact we
did some digging and it had fallen through 3 times! Ahh! So we made an
appointment to walk through it that Sunday, and our game-plan was to be
thorough and speculative; there had to be a valid reason why it was back on the
market again and listed for $90,000 less than their original asking price!!
Before we walked through the house, a white envelope showed up in our mail box
containing the most recent home inspection. The inspector found “extensive termite
damage” and “major structural issues.” Dun dun dun… So we decided to walk
through with the mind set of ‘why we should not buy this house.’ After looking thoroughly
and having a structural engineer in to give us a quote, and a new home inspection
report done, we felt comfortable and decided to place an offer!
We submitted an offer that next week with our realtor,
Belinda, and made it contingent on us getting orders to stay in Jacksonville.
So if we did not get JAX then we would walk away from the deal. A little
worried that they were not going to accept the offer, we waited, and then they
came back and were absolutely fine waiting a month for us to get orders! We
finally got our orders in mid-August and closed on our new-old place on August
24th. Now it is time for some renovations to get underway!
