Storybook Hill Series | Part 4
After finding the house that instantly felt like home, we toured it, made an offer, and were rejected. Or at least, that’s what happened on paper. If you’re new to the Storybook Hill series, start with Part 1: The Day I Found My Storybook Hill
By mid-summer, I was still doing math on a house I technically did not own and had already been rejected from purchasing.
A perfectly normal use of my time.
The listing had been sitting for months when, one afternoon, the price dropped ten percent.
Now, to normal people, that might not feel like a dramatic difference. But when you’ve spent months aggressively running mortgage calculators at midnight while simultaneously trying to “trust the universe,” a ten percent discount starts to feel surprisingly exciting.
Closer. Still…objectively insane and out of reach.
But closer.
And the strange thing was, I still wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t worried someone else would buy it. I wasn’t obsessively checking Zillow. I wasn’t trying to force anything.
I just knew.
The timing? Unclear.
The logistics? Questionable.
The financial path? Currently hidden by a combination of fog and delusion.
But somewhere underneath all of that, I still believed the house would eventually be ours. So instead of spiraling over the price drop, I did what I always do when faced with uncertainty.
I added another tab to my spreadsheet.
Because while part of me was busy visualizing gardens, coffee mugs, and peaceful mornings, another part of me was aggressively trying to spreadsheet my way into a six-thousand-square-foot estate.
And this is where my lifelong obsession with real estate became unexpectedly useful.
I’ve always loved houses.
For a brief and deeply on-brand period in my twenties, I was even a realtor, which honestly makes perfect sense because few things fascinate me more than watching people make giant emotional life decisions disguised as financial transactions.
I love all of it.
Why people move.
Why they stay.
What they prioritize.
The stories houses hold.
The psychology of negotiation.
The strange ways people assign meaning to square footage, paint colors, and kitchen islands.
It’s me. I’m people.
So after months of simply believing, I found myself getting curious again.
Not desperate.
Curious.
The kind of curiosity that has a long history of disrupting my life and occasionally dragging everyone I love along with it.
Questions started appearing that probably should have occurred to me during the first round of negotiations.
For example:
What exactly does it cost to heat and cool six thousand square feet in Wisconsin?
Important question.
Possibly one that should have come up before I emotionally moved my family into the house.
But during the first showing, I had been spiritually levitating through gardens and mentally assigning future homecoming photos to staircases. Practical concerns were not exactly leading the conversation.
At the time, I genuinely didn’t care.
Now I cared a little. Not enough to let go of the vision but just enough to start acting like someone who might actually have to pay for it.
So I asked Holly to reach back out to the listing agent and request the utility information.
Very mature.
Very responsible.
Exactly the kind of thing a serious prospective buyer asks.
The listing agent came back with the heating and cooling numbers.
But she also asked Holly: “Is this the Ripps asking?”
And honestly? That’s when the story got interesting.
The next part of the story still feels surreal to me.
Because after months of quietly believing…
after months of visualizing…
after months of fixing up our own house while this other life sat patiently in the background…we got the call.
The seller wanted to send back a counteroffer.
Not a new listing strategy.
Not a generic “still interested?”
An actual counteroffer to the offer we’d made back in March.
It was August.
We were stunned.
Not because I didn’t think it could happen.
I totally did.
But because after enough time passes, you start assuming life has moved on without you.
The counter came in. Still not where we had to be but much closer.
All the other terms stayed the same.
We could choose the closing date and she gave us plenty of time to sell our house.
And suddenly this thing that had lived mostly in visualizations and spreadsheets and emotionally unwell Zillow stalking sessions became real again.
So we went back to see the house.
This time it felt different.
Less fantasy.
More possibility.
We sat on the deck for almost two hours with Holly talking through what this would actually mean for our family if we somehow managed to pull it off financially.
It was hot out.
One of those still Wisconsin summer afternoons where everything feels sleepy and suspended in time. At one point Dale and Madeline wandered off to walk the property while Holly, Miles, and I sat talking on the deck.
Later Holly told me how sweet and mature Miles was and how proud I should be of him.
And I remember thinking:
this is what I want.
Not the status of the house.
Not the square footage.
Not the fantasy.
This.
My family scattered across a property that already somehow felt like ours.
That was the moment the house stopped feeling like a listing and started feeling like home.
Now. To be fair.
Part of my brain was still doing math like it was training for the financial Olympics.
Because historically, whenever I encounter something beautiful or exciting, my immediate instinct is:
“How do I make this profitable?”
Can this become a business?
An event space?
A retreat center?
A content opportunity?
A tax write-off?
A revenue stream?
I have accidentally monetized most of my life at this point.
And yes, I absolutely spent time trying to figure out how this property could “work for us.”
I bought a domain.
Started building a website.
Considered LLC ideas.
Started imagining retreats and workshops and experiences.
And then somewhere in the middle of all that overthinking, I stopped.
Because for once, I didn’t want to immediately turn wonder into productivity.
I didn’t want to squeeze performance out of beauty before we had even lived inside it.
I remember finally thinking:
What if we just live here first?
What if this doesn’t need to become anything immediately?
What if the point is simply that we love it?
That felt new for me.
Maybe even more radical than believing we could buy the house in the first place.
Around that same time, we were referred to the most incredible mortgage lender who somehow managed to do two things simultaneously:
Run the actual numbers.
And believe alongside us.
Which, honestly, felt necessary because most conversations surrounding investments like this tend to make your nervous system temporarily leave your body.
But she found a path.
Or at least enough of one to keep moving forward.
So the next day, we countered.
The seller accepted.
Just like that.
After months of waiting, visualizing, preparing, questioning, trusting, and occasionally spreadsheeting my way through existential real estate decisions, we had a deal.
Our closing date: 10/10/25.
Which immediately felt right to me because I’m deeply annoying about numbers and symbolism.
It was the day before my birthday.
Five days before our twentieth wedding anniversary.
A date that felt balanced.
Clean.
Significant.
Less like a date on a calendar and more like a doorway.
I had no way of knowing what was waiting on the other side.
Continue to Part 5 | Manifesting a Dream House: When Everything Started Moving →
