Beauty & Magic

Lauren and Zach Parr loved their home in California, but in 2018 they began to consider trading it in for one in Kansas.

One reason for that was that Zach’s mother, of Topeka, was sick, and he wanted to move closer to her. Another reason was that the Parrs had young children, then ages 3 and 1, and the couple were starting to imagine what their childhoods would be like. In California the skies were often smoggy, and the Parrs’ house was next to a busy road.

“It wasn’t really safe for (the kids) to go out without me, but projecting forward I wondered when I would feel safe about them going out. Probably never,” Lauren says. “There was all this traffic. Tobin was still a baby — a year and a half — and when you have a baby you’re so worried about things like is the baby going to get asthma because of all this pollution? Kansas doesn’t really have air-quality issues.”

Amid these considerations was the reality that Zach’s mother had been newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and he felt helpless to assist her from so far away. Still, the Parrs were not actively looking for a home in Lawrence on the night someone shared a listing with them on Facebook. That didn’t stop them from becoming instantly enamored with the house.

Living more than 1,500 miles away, the Parrs were unable to look at the house in person, so they sent a relative to scope it out.

“We had Zach’s dad come over and look at the house that night,” Lauren says. “He FaceTimed us around, and it looked like a good house. … it had all of these lush things, and it solved all of those things that had been on my mind, that I had been worried about.”

The Parrs bought the two-story four bedroom home at 4405 W. 12th St. before they were even able to step inside, certain they would love it based on video tours and photos.

They purchased the house in the summer of 2018 but couldn’t move until fall; they were waiting until Zach had secured a job as the senior aviation software engineer at Garmin. Zach has since switched jobs and now works as a senior game play engineer for Activision, which he