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Sunder Court

The front of our townhouse on Sunder Court

In May we bought a townhouse in Reston. Our lease for the townhouse on Lake Audubon was expiring and Julie and I really wanted to buy a place.  We really liked living on Lake Audubon, so we asked the owners if they were interested in selling it, but they said no.  I wasn’t very optimistic about finding a place in Reston as prices were mostly out of our price range, selling in the upper 180’s or more. But Julie kept looking into it and found a townhouse for sale at a really good price of $177,900. It was being sold by the owner and after talking to him we negotiated the price down to $175,000 but it was a strange transaction in that the owner didn’t want to reduce the price on the paperwork but said he would, “off the books”, give us the $2,000 at closing.  A little odd, but we proceeded.  Even with the reduced price we didn’t have enough cash on hand enough cash, so Julie’s parents gave us some money.  I was a little concerned that there was something wrong with the house, but the appraisal came through at $178,000.  The day before closing the seller said he didn’t want to give us the $2,000 at the closing but would meet us in the parking lot before the meeting and give us a check.  Ok, that sounded a bit shady, but we proceed. The day of closing I got a little nervous about this and worried we might have been conned, but he was there, gave us the check, and closing went fine.  It felt good to be a homeowner again.  We moved in the following week with several of the older boys in the Boy Scout troop helping us move.

Front house view from 2nd floor balcony

The townhouse had 1,760 square feet spread across three levels, a garage and recreation room on the first floor. On the second floor was the kitchen opening to a ground level deck in the back and the living room with a balcony in the front. The third floor had two small bedrooms and a good-sized master bedroom. There were three bathrooms, a half bath on the second floor and then two full baths on the third, one in the hall and one off the master bedroom. The house was in excellent condition, all freshly painted and with new carpet throughout.

Built in 1979, the house is in the Sunderbriar Cluster in Reston.  Reston is a planned community, designed by Robert Simon around the concept of Village Centers surrounded by housing clusters separated by green spaces and connected by pathways.  The first Village Center, built in 1964, was Lake Anne Plazza which was a short walk from Sunderbriar. Sunderbriar consisted of 33 townhouses on two streets, sixteen on Sunder Court and seventeen on Bachan Court. The two streets were in an L shape although there was barrier between the two so you could not drive from one to the other.  Our house on Sunder Court had a fifty-foot-wide wooded greenspace in the back separating us from the main road which you could not see in the summer with the leaves on the trees. In the front was Sunder Court across which was a green space with a pathway that led to Lake Anne. 

A couple months after moving in we received a letter for Vernon Dean from some financial institution which I put back in the mailbox with the note “Does not live here.”  After receiving a few more pieces of mail for Vernon Dean, had previously owned our townhouse, and was an ex-Redskins football player that got kicked off the team for drug use and had been arrested for rape for allegedly attacking a woman.  Apparently, he didn’t make payments on the house, the bank foreclosed on it and the person we bought the home from had bought it from the bank for a really good deal.

Walk from Sunder Court to Lake Anne

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