The Back Story
This house is 100 years, almost 101. The plot of land was originally bought by Pacific Railroad in 1848 and then they clearly chose to run their railway elsewhere and sold it to the township of Ocheyedan which they then used it for the sight of a coal house and school house. Eventually being sold to a rich family who built this extravagant house. We recently learned all this by reading through pages and pages of our abstract, which is extremely fascinating if you’re into that kind of stuff like me! Our house currently sits on 3 lots, which is a lot of yard space (HAPPY DANCE!) For those of you that know our house it has an empty lot next to it, which most people don’t realize is ours. Sometime in the 60s(? this is a little iffy) the house that sat on that lot was bought and then knocked down which gives us three lots. It is a 4 bedrooms, 1 ½ bath house, kitchen, dining, large living room, porch and carriage house. It is a beautiful house that really needed the right owners to come in and give it a face-lift. Which brings this to us.
How did we acquire this house?
This house has been in my family for quite some time. I moved to Ocheyedan in the 6th grade. My grandparents bought the house and rented it out to my parents. I lived in this house until my sophomore year in college. My parent’s split up in high school and my dad moved to an acreage all while renting the house out to numerous different renters. Little bit of an advice for future landlords. ALWAYS make your tenants pay a deposit and sign a lease, something my dad never did. (Where is the facepalm emoji?) With that there were renters that DESTROYED this house. Literally one lady had a petting zoo in the dining room, left in the middle of the night with hay and goats in the dining room, you literally cant make this up. Fast forward to 2016, Nick and I are living down by Des Moines and we get the opportunity to move back home and I had chatted with my grandparents who thought it would be a good home for us to have a family and fix up. Nick and I always laugh at ourselves when we think about this. Take a tour here and see what the house looked like when we acquired it in July of 2016