This March will mark three years since my wife, Britt, and I packed up a couple of suitcases, and headed, quite literally, for the hills with dog in tow, to spend what we assumed would be a week or so. This was the beginning of some of the strangest/coolest (most superlatives would work here) months of my adult life, so far. 

Britt and I had been searching for a fixer upper in the Catskill mountains since we first started seriously dating, circa 2015. In January of 2020, we finally found something with great potential for the right price. Three years later, recounting the way that all of this went down feels a lot like randomly remembering a very weird dream.

We went under contract almost immediately on the above-mentioned fixer upper. Having completed the inspection and other due diligence, the closing was scheduled for March 20, 2020. Our attorney informed us ahead of time that there was a hiccup with the title process: It turned out that the seller had owned “our” house as well as the adjacent one, which he had sold a little over a year prior. By mistake, the deed and mortgage for the adjacent parcel had both been recorded with this house included in the legal description. Whoops! Our attorney said that it was doubtful that this title company error would be resolved by the target closing date…

Britt and I brainstormed for a solution. We knew that the house was vacant, so we came up with the idea of asking the seller if we could lease the place until it was possible to close. I called our attorney, who relayed our request to the seller. The seller did us one better, and agreed to let us take possession early as long as we insured the place and switched over the utilities to our name. Done! We papered the agreement with a simple two-pager, then got busy packing the car.

The next morning, we left NYC before 7am. The listing agent had been kind enough to leave the keys in a lockbox for us, so when we arrived at the house that morning we were able to gain entry to the place with zero drama. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, and the place was pretty beat up. But hey, it was nice to be out of the city. Anyway, it was only going to be for a week or so, right?