About Hope Greenlee, Realtor When my husband and I bought our house, our friends didn’t just think we were crazy—they thought we had completely lost it. The house, if you could even call it that, was a 4,800 sq. ft. shell sitting on half an acre of waterfront property on the Chesapeake Bay. It had been a foreclosure, abandoned, and left to decay, becoming a hangout spot for kids and a dumping ground for trash. The place was a disaster. There was no water or electricity. Trees were growing through the deck where boards used to be, and the dual HVAC units had been shoved through a wall, leaving a massive hole on the second floor. The first floor had no working windows, most of the glass was smashed out, and even the toilets were destroyed—shattered into pieces as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. Inside, the master bedroom’s 25-foot ceiling showcased a massive roof leak, complete with black mold spreading ominously down the walls. Animal footprints covered the third- floor loft, and the yard was littered with broken appliances, car parts, and piles of trash. One friend still laughs as he reminds us of the time he stood on the top floor and could look straight down through the gaping holes in the floors to the kitchen below. “You two weren’t just crazy—you were out of your minds ,” he says every time. There were also tens of thousands of dollars in code enforcement violations, no permits pulled for the construction, and the house was located in the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area, adding layers of regulatory hurdles. What was supposed to be a 1,200 sq. ft. home had ballooned into a sprawling, unfinished mess. But we saw something no one else did: potential. We bought the house for $365,000, making it the cheapest waterfront property in the zip code we had dreamed of living in. It was a massive gamble, but we believed in the location and the vision we had for the home. Over the years, we poured our time,
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