The first time we saw our house!

Eleven years ago we came to see a house in Carlisle, PA. Not our current one, but that’s still part of our story.

We saw a listing for a Victorian house with a flying staircase and all new mechanicals. Looking at the pictures we just couldn’t figure out why it was priced so low. Curiosity is an amazing motivator so we drove the 20 minutes to Carlisle, to see why. The house wasn’t the problem, it was the neighborhood.

Dejected I got back in the car. Eric started driving but not toward home. I had never been on Spring Garden Street before. I was enjoying the sights when suddenly I saw a big barn by the road, with a lane beside it. At the far end of the lane was a limestone farm house. I asked Eric if he had seen the house. As we topped the hill he pulled into Cumberland Valley Trout Unlimited’s parking area.

The house wasn’t abandoned but it hadn’t been lived in recently. We walked along the property line, through TU’s ground, down to the Letort Spring Run and then took the Fisherman’s Path along the creek behind the house. The more we looked, the more excited we became. The house clearly needed a lot of love (I will chronicle this later). We decided to have a closer look, heading for the front porch. We knocked, knowing it was silly. With the grass two feet tall, we were sure no one was living there. There wasn’t even a mailbox! Peering in the window of the front door, down the hall, into the kitchen, we saw a fireplace! My heart was racing at this point. I needed to know who owned this amazing place and did they want to sell it.

More on how that worked out in my next blog. Don’t miss it!