House of Dreams

A 19th-century beauty turns his head

We should have walked away from the table.

My partner and I are generally intelligent people. But one fateful afternoon in June 2005, sitting in a nondescript conference room in Bowie, we made an emotional decision that we're still paying for.

We were closing on the purchase of a house. We thought the property was special. The main part of the home was built circa 1893, although it had been expanded over the next 30 or 40 years. A comfortable size now, with five large rooms on the first floor that could be used for entertaining, it would be perfect for our annual Christmas and Fourth of July parties. It sat on the last two heavily wooded acres of what was once a substantial family farm. Before that, the land had been part of a 650-acre estate owned by Supreme Court Justice Gabriel Duvall in the 1800s. It was just 16 miles and a direct commute down Maryland Highway 50 from our downtown offices. We had been hooked from the first time we saw it that April.

After the sterility of a cookie-cutter suburb, the sylvan setting charmed us. The front facade, with its two rows of columns fronting deep double porches, appealed to my Southern roots. We spent more than two hours touring the property. We had been scheduled to look at another house after that one. Not necessary, we told our Realtor. Within five hours, we had a preapproval letter in hand from Chase Manhattan Bank, which had financed our three previous homes. We made an appointment with our Realtor for the next morning to write an offer.

The house was far from perfect. We would be moving from a home that we had just built in 2001, exchanging four bathrooms for two; the reliability and convenience of a gas fireplace and central heating for a wood-burning fireplace and old-fashioned radiators; thoroughly sealed modern construction for poorly insulated walls and drafty windows. The house needed some TLC, but it seemed solid. It had stood for 112 years, and we could see it standing for 100 more.

Then there was the neighborhood. The house was close to the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Trail, perfect for riding bikes and long Sunday afternoon walks. A quick jog away was a neighborhood park with tennis courts; in another direction was a community center with a pool; in yet another, a golf club. The bonus was that there was no homeowners association to regulate whether we could fence the yard, build a shed or put in a pool -- issues that had grown contentious in the community where we lived. McMansions on one-acre lots adjoined our dream property, but a thick tree line preserved the solitude. We could be our own subdivision.

The Washington housing market was at its height. Our house in Upper Marlboro had doubled in value in just four years, and we were amazed at our good fortune. What value, then, could we put on a historic house on two acres in one of Prince George's County's prime neighborhoods? The $550,000 asking price seemed cheap to us.

People were in a buying and building frenzy. Even so, few seemed to want an old house with its old-house problems. We were different. We've long enjoyed transforming houses with paint, elbow grease and vision. We figured we could invest a couple hundred thousand dollars in serious kitchen and bath upgrades, scrub the property into a true showplace and see another investment double in a few short years. We told ourselves we were also saving the house from developers, one of whom had bought a mid-century ranch house on two acres directly across the street and was preparing to tear it down. The owners of the property we were buying had already rejected one such bid because they wanted to see the house preserved.

Truth is, as much as we loved the house, we also loved the money we thought we would make on the deal. If we bought the house and were later offered enough, we knew we would sell to the highest bidder and decamp to Fort Lauderdale. We lowballed the owners and eventually agreed on a price of $515,000.

These thoughts flashed through my mind as I reviewed the closing documents that June day. We still owned our house in Upper Marlboro. We had had multiple offers for it, but we had been informed less than 12 hours before closing that the buyer couldn't complete her loan. We were counting on profit from the sale of our house to help buy the new property. We were now more than two weeks past the date we were originally supposed to complete our purchase.

The sellers had not officially extended our contract; they were willing to wait, as long as another buyer didn't come along with ready cash. They, too, needed the money from the sale to buy their retirement home at the beach in Delaware, and we could hear the clock ticking. Our moving date had changed a couple of times already to deal with the unexpected, and I was loath to change it again. Everyone's lives had been in limbo long enough.

We had turned to a mortgage broker to find us a loan that would allow us to buy the dream house while still owning the one in Upper Marlboro. The broker swung by our house one morning, with a box of gourmet doughnuts in hand, to get our signatures on a mortgage application he said he would complete after he had assembled all of our documentation. He assured us that with our income and credit, he would have no problem placing our loan. In fact, he said, he could easily get us a mortgage for more than $1 million, if we wanted to buy a house in that price range. We grabbed the broker's words like a lifeline.