The Rev. Ron Hieber and his wife, Fran, needed to move closer intown for Ron’s job at Clairmont Presbyterian Church in Decatur. After raising their children in Gwinnett County’s Hamilton Mill neighborhood in Dacula, they were seeking a shorter commute for Ron, a pastor who lived at least an hour away from the churches he had served in metro Atlanta during the past 30 years. Ron, 65, and Fran, 63, chatted about their purchase in Atlanta’s Somervale neighborhood, in DeKalb County, just five minutes from the church.
Q: Why did you move now?
Fran: My husband grew up [intown] and he kind of has always wanted to be back in the area. Especially in the position he's in right now at Clairmont Presbyterian, he ministers to the seniors, and that requires a lot of [visits to] hospitals and nursing homes. He would make a daily commute and then sometimes have to make the commute twice, about an hour each way. That was what really kind of put us over the edge to really get serious and start looking intown (they were assisted by Carrie Qualters with Keller Williams Buckhead).
Q: Did you want the same type of home you previously owned?
Fran: We had a 4,200-square-foot house in Hamilton Mill, which was wonderful with our children, but we didn't need that much space. We were looking for a house that had some good flow to it. We weren't real crazy about the houses from the '60s, the little brick ranches. We were used to more open space.
Q: What special space needs did you have?
Fran: I definitely needed a home office because I have two businesses (she's a representative with Juice Plus and a fashion consultant with CAbi) I run out of my home. Me, personally, I don't want to be stuck in the spare bedroom.
Q: How long did you search?
Fran: We had been looking seriously about two years ago. At that particular time, we put our house on the market. Then the bottom fell out. Nobody looked at our house for six months. But we still kept looking. We would make offers, and for various reasons, either somebody would outbid us or we wouldn't get approved for that amount of the money. The end result was we found this wonderful house.
Q: How did this home appeal to you?
Ron: It was like it was almost waiting for us. The living room leads right into a sunroom. Off of that, there's a huge, long screened-in porch. Under that porch in the basement area, another covered porch runs the whole length of the house. Even though that's the basement, you're still 15 feet off the ground and there's another basement underneath that basement. There's a beautiful waterfall that they put in that goes to a pond with a bridge over it, that goes to another pond. The backyard backs up to Peachtree Creek. It is very quiet. It has a lot of trees.
Q: How did you emotionally handle your search?
Ron: We would get excited and we would get frustrated. We would take a two- or three-month break and then we would get the fever again and want to look again. When this house came, it was a great location, it had been sitting here [on the market] a year, it didn't need anything but cosmetic [changes]. I think when it's supposed to happen, you don't have to force it to happen. It just works out.
At a glance
Ron and Fran Hieber’s home, built in 1991, has four bedrooms, two full and two half baths, and about 2,300 square feet. They purchased it in October. Recent sales in the Somervale neighborhood have been in the $300,000s to $320,000s.
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