She knew the minute she walked in the front door.
"The house spoke to me," said Susan Foster. Sure, as a Realtor with Keller Williams Realty Integrity Lakes, she spends many a workday walking into homes. But when she set foot into this 594-square-foot house in south Minneapolis built in 1925, she experienced the immediate feeling that she'd found her happy place and home away from home.
Foster's full-time residence is a bungalow she shares with partner Dick Brewer, a fine artist, who works from a studio that was built on the back of their lot. "He's an extrovert, and he has other artists and friends stopping by all day to talk with him," she explained.
Their dog, Gus, is a "barks-trovert," since he sets up a loud canine alarm for every new visitor, backyard squirrel or falling leaf (you're welcome, humans). "It's a fine place to be, as long as you don't want to string two consecutive thoughts together or have any semblance of peace and quiet," she said.
Which brings us to this classic workman's cottage, less than a mile from her home, which Foster instantly recognized as the office and retreat her overstimulated nervous system needed.
"I belong to an accountability group with six other Realtors," she said. "In the summer of 2021, we weren't fully back in our offices, but I was super busy. That's when I realized that I couldn't focus at home. I brought it up to the group, and someone said, 'Why don't you set up a search for a very small place?' I'm experienced in setting up these searches for clients, so I entered in my budget and then waited to see what might come up," Foster said.
Love at first sight
While Foster began the process with no preconceived notions about what she wanted, or even without the hope that a solution existed, she soon got a match for the property in the Morris Park neighborhood. "I'd been to one other place before that, and it wasn't a good fit," she recalled. "It was a condo in Bloomington with a floorplan I didn't like and not enough light. It made me cringe."