Buying my first home

By the end of 2011 I had been working at the grocery company for a few years, I had finished my associate’s degree and was working through my computer science degree at UMSL, and I was still living at home with my parents. It was a good deal, honestly. No rent, food in the fridge, free heat, free water, free everything. They were generous about it and never asked me for a dime.

But I had two cars sitting in their driveway, a Chevy Corsica and a Volkswagen Jetta, two pinball machines crammed into their house (Star Wars and Johnny Mnemonic), and I was starting to want my own space. I think my parents were also getting a little tired of me, which is fair. And I had been saving. I can’t tell you the exact number anymore, but I sat down, did the math, and realized I had enough for a down payment on a house of my own.

There was a thesis behind it, too. This was only three years after the 2008 crash, and the housing market was still climbing back out of the hole. My bet was that if I bought early, while prices were still soft, I might find a deal and get in before everything went up again. Spoiler: it turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Looking, slowly

So at the end of 2011 I started looking, very casually. I was excited and genuinely reluctant at the same time. Buying a house meant a big change: managing my own place, a stack of bills I had never had to think about, all the quiet responsibilities that come with owning the roof over your head. I was in no rush. I had time on my side and I was holding out for the most perfect situation I could find.

I had two requirements. First, I wanted to stay close to my parents, within about a twenty-minute drive. Second, and this one was non-negotiable, I wanted a walkout basement. My parents’ house meant hauling pinball machines up and down a flight of stairs, which is miserable and slightly dangerous, and pinball was my up-and-coming hobby. A walkout basement meant I could roll a machine straight in at ground level.

I looked at a few places in O’Fallon and a few in Lake St. Louis that seemed cool, but nothing spoke to me. Then, once I got serious in early 2012, I hired a realtor named Jennifer. I sort of stumbled into her, and I got lucky. She was kind, and she respected that someone my age wanted to buy a house and could actually pull it off. I was grateful to have her.

The house nobody could get into

Then I found it: walkout basement, plenty of space, everything I could see from the listing looked right. Jennifer went out to check the place before our showing, and that is when the whole strange backstory came out.

She couldn’t get in. The front door lock was jammed, completely. Nobody had been able to tour the house.

Here is what had happened. The family who lived here before me had a dad who got transferred for work, and his company used one of those relocation outfits, the kind that boxes up your stuff, moves you, and then buys your house from you so you don’t have to juggle selling a home while starting a new job. This particular company was based out in Colorado. So they now owned a house in Missouri they had never set foot in, and it would not sell.

They were baffled. All they were getting was secondhand chatter from realtors, and the chatter was that the house looked hideous. The previous owners had gone wild with aqua and country-pumpkin wallpaper in every room, over carpet that was some kind of teal. So the relocation company spent a real chunk of money fixing it: ripped out all the wallpaper, put in brand-new carpet, and repainted the whole place one clean, uniform color.

And it still wasn’t selling. So, sitting in Colorado with no real information, they did the only thing they could think of and started dropping the price by $10,000 at a time, figuring something must be wrong with it. The actual problem, the one nobody ever relayed to them, was that the front door lock was broken and not a single person could get inside to look.

Jennifer figured it out and just took care of it. She hired a locksmith, got the door fixed and open, and we toured the house that same day. My mom and dad came along, they thought it was a great house, I thought so too, and that was that. I closed on it on March 18, 2012. A house that had been quietly marked down again and again for a problem that was just a stuck lock.

An empty house and a $5,000 refrigerator

Here is the thing nobody tells you. All the furniture I had grown up with belonged to my parents, so on day one I owned essentially nothing. The one thing the house did come with was an old piano in the basement, too heavy to be worth moving, so the previous owners just left it. I bought a bed in a hurry, didn’t even have a frame for it at first, and a desk for my computer. For a while the house was a bed, a desk, my computer, and two pinball machines down in the basement. That was the entire inventory.

Then came the long list: a sofa, end tables, a bedroom set, furniture for an office and a spare bedroom. And the real essentials. My grandma gave me $5,000, and I put every cent of it toward a refrigerator, a washer, a dryer, and a vacuum cleaner. I was incredibly grateful for that boost, because I had emptied my savings into the down payment specifically so I could put enough down to skip PMI. I was not exactly flush the day I moved in. A month later I adopted KOTEHOK, and the place started to feel like home.

Fourteen years of one view

I have now lived here about fourteen years, and the strange gift of staying put is that you get to watch a small slice of a neighborhood slowly change.

The house to my right has been a rental for most of my time here, with a stretch in the middle where a couple owned it and renovated it room by room while they lived in it. Before all that there was a woman who, as far as I could tell, never once came outside. To my left, a young family lived there when I moved in and was gone within a year or two. The neighbors who replaced them are wonderful. They have two boys, and the school bus used to stop right in front of my house, so I got a front-row seat to the whole thing: little kids in second and third grade, then fourth, and as I write this their oldest just finished high school and is about to leave for college. I don’t have kids of my own, so watching another family’s kids grow up from a friendly distance, get older, get a car, head off into their lives, has been one of the unexpectedly nice parts of staying somewhere a long time.

Plenty of other neighbors have come and gone over the years, and I remember a lot of them fondly. Diane, Betty, John, and others who have since moved away or passed on. I’ve also been lucky with the ones here now: Chris and his wife, Karl and Barb, Amy, Carrie, and Shannon. It’s a good street, and that is not something you can pick out from a listing.

And then there was Ozzie. For most of the years I’ve lived here, the neighborhood had a black cat that nobody quite owned and everybody quietly looked after, and he was as much a fixture of this place as any of the houses on it. He’s gone now, but he was part of the texture of my life here for a very long time, and I gave him his own goodbye.

I’ve put up Christmas lights some years. I lived here long enough to watch the whole street get torn out and repaved, which was its own slow-motion spectacle of cones and fresh concrete.

The biggest visible change is the trees. In the photo at the top of this post, from 2012, there are two big trees in the front yard. Both of them eventually died of emerald ash borer, the beetle that has been wiping out ash trees across the Midwest, so they came down. I’ve since planted two small replacements that will take another ten or twenty years to reach the height of the ones I lost. My neighbors behind me also cut all their trees down, simply because they were tired of raking the leaves. Here is the same house, same angle, in 2026, so you can see the difference the years made.

Making it mine

I’ve done a lot of work to this place over the years. In the summer of 2024, the year my company downsized and I lost my job, I suddenly had a lot of free time, so my project was rebuilding the deck: replacing the broken boards and putting a fresh finish on the whole thing. I set up a camera and let it run.

Inside, I completely refurbished the basement, which is a whole story of its own that I want to tell properly later, because I have the photos to walk through how I did it. More recently I finally pulled out all the upstairs carpet and replaced it with high-quality laminate vinyl that looks fantastic, repainted every single room, and I’m still slowly redecorating a year on. Getting rid of that carpet was a dream I had sat on for years. I have terrible allergies and was always half-convinced the carpet was quietly making it worse, but I kept putting it off, because doing it meant emptying the entire first floor of furniture and life so someone could come tear it all out and lay the new floor. Worth it.

If I had to name the genuinely hardest part of owning a home, it is the landscaping. There is always a weed to pull, a patch of lawn to fix, a tree to trim, something on the outside that needs attention. It never ends. But I’m enjoying it, I’m happy here, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next between me and this house.