My New Home: With eye to future, nurse finds Cordova home with room for 3 generations
Kathleen Pritchett with her seven-year old Schnoodles, Bishop and Duke, have found the perfect home in their new house in Cordova.
She’s 28 and not yet married, but Memphian Kathleen Pritchett had her eyes open for one main feature when she started house hunting last spring.
“I wanted the family home,” she said. “More space.”
Kathleen Pritchett looked at more than 100 homes before finding just the right house in Cordova’s Riverwood Farms area.
The living room has a great open feel without being open to the kitchen.
The kitchen is well-appointed and boasts lots of cabinet space.
A breakfast nook has become the preferred dining area as it is just off the kitchen and receives a lot of natural light from the windows along the back of the house.
The master bedroom, with vaulted ceilings and lots of space, was a huge selling point for the home.
In fact, she was on the hunt for a place that could house three generations. In each house she visited, she scouted not only for the perfect future nursery, but also for a comfortable guest suite in hopes that her parents might move in too.
“I’m trying to get them up here,” Pritchett said of her mom and dad, who live in Florida. Last February, her mother lost her eyesight in a household accident, so it was important to Pritchett, a registered nurse, to find a house with downstairs bedrooms and accessible design features.
“Everything I looked at, I had to keep her in mind too,” she said. “She’s not able to go up and down stairs.”
With boyfriend Martin Brock at her side and Realtor Jerri Bridges of Crye-Leike’s Quail Hollow office to guide her, Pritchett viewed more than 100 homes spanning from Bartlett to Germantown to Cordova.
The threesome searched for nearly a year.
“She was really patient,” Pritchett said of Bridges. “She always jokes that her biggest file belongs to us.”
But Pritchett and Brock worked overtime to pull their weight in the search, driving around after work to check out neighborhoods and narrow down prospective listings.
“They would stay on the computer at night looking too,” Bridges said. “It was a joint venture. Our biggest challenge was finding what they wanted — the size of the house, in good condition — at the price they needed. So we just kept working at it.”
Finally, their hard work paid off.
Bridges took the couple to see a home in Cordova’s Riverwood Farms subdivision that met all Pritchett’s criteria and then some.
“As soon as we walked in, I knew,” said Brock, event manager at Christian Brothers University. “I said to Jerri, ‘She’s going to sign.’”
The house had the ideal layout: four bedrooms, a spacious master suite and potential nursery on one side and two bedrooms with a guest bath between them on the other. It also had a large kitchen and living area with plenty of space to entertain, as well as a big backyard for the couple’s two dogs, Duke and Bishop.
Pritchett made an offer on the spot. She purchased the 2,600-square-foot house in late March for $185,000.
“The process was really quick,” Brock said. “There were absolutely no glitches. The sellers had already moved out and were really flexible.”
They were also generous. Because they were moving out of Memphis, the sellers included several key items in the sale, including living and dining room furniture, a bedroom suite, a treadmill, washer and dryer, two refrigerators, patio furniture and artwork.
They also left the house in move-in ready condition. So far, Pritchett hasn’t changed a thing, though she does plan to do some painting and decorating down the road.
“Mostly cosmetic stuff,” she said. “It already had great hardwood floors, smooth ceilings throughout. It really was move-in ready.”
In the living room, a cozy seating area angles toward a corner fireplace with a built-in, floor-to-ceiling surround that encloses a flat-screen TV also left by the previous owners. Its pale gold walls continue into a breakfast area large enough for a high dining table and four chairs and a chest of drawers that Pritchett uses as a sideboard. The sage green kitchen features extra-tall cabinetry, solid surface countertops, a gas cooktop and double ovens.
Off the kitchen, a hallway leads to two bedrooms, one with a light, airy color scheme and a king-size bed Pritchett outfitted with her parents in mind. The other guest room is decorated in blue and brown, with brown curtains and a damask bedspread with touches of gold.
Above the garage, a large bonus space will serve as a game room and contains the home’s third bathroom.
Across the house, a rust-colored dining room is tucked just inside the entry. A short hall separates a front bedroom — which features floor-to-ceiling bay windows and will one day, Pritchett hopes, serve as a nursery — from the master suite. Pritchett decorated the master bedroom with green curtains and a crisp white duvet. The master bath features two sinks, a separate tub and shower, and his-and-hers closets.
Pritchett said she’s already met several of her new neighbors, and she loves living in Cordova.
“We have a lot of friends out here,” she said. “We were already driving here all the time to see friends, so we knew we liked the area. It’s funny how everything fell into place.”
