It's a little sad and amazing that I have no idea where to start. The beginning of this process was pretty normal. I had a realtor (I had briefly, at the start of 2009, looked at condos and completely chickened out). I asked him to start pulling stuff on MLS. At the start, I knew, because of the dead real estate market and the fact that I would now have a lodger (loml), that I could afford a building instead of a condo. So the listings were single families, two flats and three flats.

Loml accompanied me on all expeditions, even though it would be my mortgage, I wanted us to both like the place we chose.

After the first trip, it was fairly clear that while I could afford a multi-unit building, any building in my price point would need work. While I wasn't against that, I didn't want to buy a place that would require a ton of time, money and annoyance to get it right. At that point, single family seemed the way to go.

So we went out again, this time to a variety of single families. And on this trip, we saw the house for the first time. As we were walking around in it, I remember whispering to loml that I really liked this one. It was the only house that I did that. And it was allll downhill from there.

On our third trip out, we went back to two single families that we had really liked. And I pretty much settled on the fact that I wanted the whisper house. I wanted it even with this on the wall: