I knew that I would never be able to afford the house of my dreams, so I changed my dreams.
Instead of picturing that perfect house I could move into as-is, I realized that I should instead find a house I could make perfect.
There are a thousand little details you can change about a house, as long as the structure is good and the layout is right. At that point I expanded my search and found a fixer-upper that I felt had the potential to be my dream house. There would be a lot of work involved, a heavy amount of floor maintenance, and a great deal of cleaning to be done. The floor maintenance was the biggest issue for me, because several floorboards would need to be removed and replaced. I am not expert on floor maintenance and didn’t want to screw up the rest of the floorboards so I called in an expert. There was a local business that specializes in floor cleaning, floor stripping and waxing, and even full replacement of flooring in some cases. Of course I was planning on doing all of the floor cleaning myself, but I couldn’t start that chore until the boards had been repaired. The gentlemen who owned the floor cleaning business gave me a full inspection and a written estimate. His estimate also included a full floor cleaning, with stripping and waxing, and was surprisingly low! I decided it would easily be worth a few extra bucks to have him do the floor cleaning as well as everything else.