Sean Not John: 9213 Riverstone Court

After we accepted the job offer at Texas A&M University, Annette and I planned a house-hunting trip to College Station, Texas during Spring Break 2005. Grandma Tueller agreed to come to Oklahoma and stay with the kids while we traveled to Texas to look for a new house.

We took Ashton (8 months) with us because he was still nursing. We took Tanner (10) with us because we knew he would be a big tease for the other kids and did not want Grandma Tueller to deal with keeping Tanner away from Jamie (12) and Allyn (7).

Annette and I used realtor.com to look for houses listed in College Station. Our realtor in Norman connected us to Suzie Bush (Realtor in College Station). We sent Suzie a list of about 30 homes in College Station which looked interesting to us. Then, we drove to College Station for the week.

On Monday, we looked at about 20 homes from our list (mostly in the Edelweiss, Pebble Creek, and Castlegate neighborhoods in College Station). While we liked a few of the homes, none of them seemed "right" for us.

Our first choice based on the information available on realtor.com was a house located at 3011 Cochise Court. We liked this house as an option because it was within sight of the Stake Center in College Station. However, the house had not been cared for and was more run down than we wanted to accept.

Another home we liked (105 Sophia Lane) was brand new and just coming on the market after the builder finished it. We were in the backyard after touring the inside of the house when a train came through town. The train tracks are just about 500 yards across Wellborn Road from this house. We immediately crossed that house off our list because the train was so loud.

We looked at 1811 Springbrook Estates Drive (it did not have a swimming pool then). This house was slightly bigger and had a HUGE backyard. But the kitchen did not work for us and the master suite was on the second floor.

We looked at more houses on Tuesday morning but still were not finding anything that seemed like what we wanted. By the end of Tuesday afternoon, we started thinking about building a house. We even picked out the lot on 4401 Edinburgh Place for building a house. We asked Suzie to schedule a couple of builders to meet on Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, we went back to the hotel a little discouraged that we had looked at so many houses but could not find one that seemed to meet our needs. Part of the issue is we were looking at houses in our price range that had four bedrooms. However, when we came to look at the houses we would discover that they were just "too small" for our growing family.

I decided to look for any new listings on realtor.com. We had previously looked at 9213 Riverstone Court on the realtor.com website but ruled it out because it was "too big" and at the upper limit of our budget. Further, the house was obscured by trees and foliage in the listing picture. Thus, we skipped over it several times in our online searches.

9213 Riverstone Court (March 2005)
from the curb when we bought it

9213 Riverstone Court (August 2022)
from the curb after we modified the house

Annette and I decided to ask Suzie if we could see it on Wednesday morning as the last option before we met with a home builder.

And...

The rest is history. The house did not have good curb appeal with all the bushes obscuring the front door. But once we were inside, we really liked the house. Tanner loved the backyard and access to the creek. We made an offer on the house and the sellers accepted. We took lots of pictures to share with everyone else when we returned home to Oklahoma.

I included pictures of the exterior in this post. You can see pictures of the interior in my "House Remodel and Wet Floorboards" post.