Posted on May - 01 - 2010
My New Home: Impossible house
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The Endicott family are (left to right) Alaina, 6, Walt, Zoe, 8, and Tara.
Photo by Brandon Dill
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Tara Endicott’s family recently purchased this home in Bartlett.
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The living room contains one of the home’s two fireplaces, a big selling feature for Tara Endicott, who grew up in Midtown, surrounded by the charm and architectural details of older homes.
Photo by Brandon Dill
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The Endicott family enjoys their state of the art kitchen featuring a preparation island with barstool seating.
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The Endicott family’s front living room features abundant natural light.
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The two-story home has a wide front entry. A series of round white columns sets off the open dining room, which holds an antique oval table and six chairs that belonged to Walt Endicott’s grandmother.
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Walt and Tara Endicott’s master bedroom.
In the search for their family’s new home, Tara and Walt Endicott refused to let the word “compromise” enter their vocabulary. The Memphis couple knew what they wanted, and they were determined to get it.
“I said, ‘If we’re going to buy this big house and stay there for the next 15 to 20 years, I want it to be perfect,’” said Tara, a registered nurse at Lakeside Behavioral Health System. “I wanted it to be exactly what we were looking for. We had no reason to settle.”
That’s because the family of five, including daughters Emory, 13, Zoe, 8, and Alaina, almost 7, were renting a Midtown house at the time from Tara’s mother, Angie Kirkpatrick.
“We didn’t have to get out of the house quickly,” Tara said.
Not only did they have all the time in the world to search, they had a real estate professional at their fingertips who was specially tuned in to all the family’s needs — Kirkpatrick is a Realtor with Crye-Leike’s East Memphis office.
She joked that the Endicotts were “the hardest buyers I have ever had.”
“We looked at more houses than I’d ever shown anybody before,” Kirkpatrick said. “They wanted the impossible and saw hundreds of houses, but finally found just what they wanted.”
To make that happen, Tara added, they “looked really hard every weekend for about a year. And we usually did about 10 houses a weekend. So I would easily say we probably looked at 400 houses.”
She said working with her mother was a fun experience.
“We told her exactly what we wanted, and she did a bunch of research,” Tara said. “She’d pull them and go through them and we’d go to work. She put long and hard hours into it. I thought she would complain because we were taking so long, but she didn’t.”
The effort turned out to be worth it.
The family’s wish list wasn’t simple, and the search took them across Shelby County and beyond. With Kirkpatrick’s help, the Endicotts viewed homes in Memphis, Arlington, Lakeland, Collierville, Germantown and Fayette County.
But when they finally found the house that had everything they were looking for — five bedrooms, a large playroom, a three-car garage and a big yard, all within a budget of less than $300,000 — it was in Bartlett.
“I wasn’t actually really keen on Bartlett,” Tara said. “My husband said, ‘Just give Bartlett a chance. Just look at it.’”
Having already decided she wouldn’t like it, Tara agreed to view the house anyway.
“And I liked it as soon as I pulled up,” she said.
Not only was the house exactly what she’d envisioned, but the neighborhood charmed her from the start.
“This neighborhood, it’s newer, but there are older neighborhoods around it,” she said. “When we pulled in, I saw families out walking. Somebody was walking a dog, there were kids playing basketball in a driveway.
“And the house, when we walked in, was just perfect. It had everything we were looking for and the price was unbelievable.”
The Endicotts finally closed on their new home in late October. They paid $215,000 for the five-bedroom, three and a half-bath, 3,600-square-foot home in Bartlett’s Winding Oaks neighborhood.
The two-story, tan-brick home has a wide front entry that opens to a sweeping view of an open, high-ceilinged living area. A series of round white columns sets off the open dining room, which holds an antique oval table and six chairs that belonged to Walt’s grandmother.
The living room contains one of the home’s two fireplaces, a big selling feature for Tara, who grew up in Midtown, surrounded by the charm and architectural details of older homes.
“That drew me in that we could all sit around the fireplace,” she said.
Off one side of the main living area is a large kitchen with ceramic tile floors, stainless steel appliances and a two-tiered island with a cooktop and a breakfast bar large enough for three bar-height chairs. An eat-in area offers space for a dining table and six more chairs.
A short hall leads to a half bath, enclosed laundry room and the family’s wished-for three-car garage.
On the other side of the kitchen, a cozy hearth room features a corner fireplace, large flat-screen TV and a sofa and loveseat with room for the whole family to gather.
“The house is big, but I really like that we can all be there in that one little area,” said Tara, adding that while the family wanted a big house, they also “wanted it to feel homey. I didn’t want it to be so big I felt like I never saw anybody or we weren’t together.”
Still, the home’s floor plan offers privacy for all members of the family.
The downstairs master suite is separated from the main living area and includes a large en-suite bath with a split vanity, ceramic tile floor, whirlpool tub and separate shower.
Upstairs, wrought-iron rails wrap a walkway that overlooks the living area and entry. At one end of the hall, Emory’s room suits her teenage girl tastes with stylish steel-gray walls and a metal canopy bed topped with white, gauzy fabric.
Her bath separates it from Walt’s home office, painted two shades of deep tan and large enough for a desk, entertainment unit, bookshelves and a closet full of computer equipment. Walt works in information technology for ADT.
At the opposite end of the hall, Zoe’s room is covered in zebra print — with black-and-white striped bedding, draperies and rug. And Alaina’s girly room sports lime green walls, Tinkerbell bedding and a long walk-in closet.
One of Tara’s favorite features is the oversized playroom, which sits above the three-car garage and spans its length. The room is divided into two areas: an entertainment area that doubles as guest room space with a futon and an extra bed, and a spacious play area for the girls.
“They’ve been able to sit up there together and play, where before all we had was just one little living room, and everything was in that room,” Tara said.
Kirkpatrick said although the search was difficult, helping her daughter finally get into her dream house was “pretty amazing.”
“They had this list of what they wanted, and I was trying to tell her, ‘You have to compromise. You can’t get everything you want, and they pretty much got everything they wanted,” she said.
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