Is it time to buy your first home?
Ten years is a long time to call a place home — especially when that home is a rented apartment. Yet for Pittsburgh couple Lisa Toboz and Jeffrey Schreckengost, their storefront apartment that doubled as a guitar-building workshop in the city’s Garfield neighborhood proved the perfect place to remain renters. “We lived in Garfield for 10 years before we decided to buy,” Toboz said. “We loved being so close to work and being able to walk right outside our door and be a part of the arts festivals, restaurants, a grocery store. We also loved the unique storefront space where we lived, since it afforded us free range to make as much noise as we wanted for making art and music.” Though Garfield had provided the couple with space to pursue their musical and artistic practices while also being close to all their essentials, the desire to buy began percolating , driven by, as Toboz said, “the usual things [people want] when buying a house: a place to call our own and do what we wanted with ...