Experience Of Buying Our First Home Was Written By Jesse Smith

My parents raised us to take care of your family and be proud of owning your home.

• At this point, my children were school age and my wife and I tried to do the best we could for them so we bought a two-flat building in a nice neighborhood about 6 blocks away from my parents, which was the west side of Chicago
• The west side of Chicago, the Austin neighborhood, is known by many Chicago residents as the ghetto and has the highest crime rates in the city
• We were so proud of that house
• To us, the home was great, no mice and it was our own
• I listened to my father’s advice he said buy a two-flat building and you can have someone else help pay the mortgage
• It even had an illegal basement apartment that we could rent out
• We were able to bargain the house down to $33,000, to us that still seemed like a fortune
• So we settled in ready to make those payments for the next 30 years
• We live about two houses away from the elevated tracks and we when trains came by and you were outside you couldn’t hear you’re self talk
• But after a little while, we didn’t even notice the noise
• After living on the first floor for the first ten years of our marriage, my wife suggested that we live on the second floor so we didn’t have to hear anyone’s noise over our heads
• We got lucky our tenant on the first floor was an older couple who always paid their rent
• Not always on time but they always paid

In this article, we will discuss and cover Buying Our First Home And Becoming First Time Home Buyers.

Buying Our First Home And Doing Maintenance In Buying A Two Unit Building

My father always taught his three boys to do work around the house, so I didn’t run into any major issues keeping things running.

• Learning how to fix things came always handy
• As kids we weren’t supposed to go outside when my parents weren’t home; of course, being kids we didn’t listen
• One summer day we went outside to play while my parents were at work
• About lunchtime, we went to go inside to eat and discovered in our hurry to go outside no one remembered to get the keys
• We started to panic but the things my father taught us kicked in
• Our front door it had a diamond-shaped window in the top, so we broke the window me being the tallest I reach in and unlock the door
• We then took the frame out of the door and took it to the hardware store had glass made, smudged it up a little to make it look used, not bad for three kids under 15 years old

We had a good laugh when told my parents years later after we were adults.

Thinking Of Exiting The InterCity

My wife and I always want our kids to have the best we could provide so we enrolled them in a school a few miles from our home and my wife got a job as a school bus driver at the school so she could take them to school each day. Things were looking pretty good, even though we lived in a pretty good neighborhood we still live in the intercity. At this point, my wife started working at the office in the western suburbs. One of her friends from work invited us to dinner at her home in Bolingbrook. During dinner, we went out on her deck and for the first time saw rabbits (which I will come to hate later) running around in the back yard, it seemed so peaceful. We came home that night and decided it time to move out of the city.