Damon Young was making a routine drive through a Collierville neighborhood, scouting out homes for sale, when he noticed something odd. A house whose yard had been choked for months by overgrown landscaping suddenly looked shiny and new.

“I noticed the house had recently been painted and the lawn had been manicured,” said Young, a senior vice president with Vining Sparks. “It really piqued my curiosity.”

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Damon Young noticed the home on a routine drive through the Collierville neighborhood. He tracked down the owner in California, who told him where to find a key, and within two hours, they’d negotiated a price.

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The kitchen is central to the house and flows into a comfortable hearth room. “This is by far my favorite room in the house,” Young said. Lorentz added, “Family time is so important because we don’t have a ton of it. We love this room.”

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The pass-through fireplace that heats the master bedroom also creates a cozy relaxing bath (below). “This bathroom would have been enough to sell most people on the house,” Lorentz said.

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He got out of his car, walked up to the house and peeked inside. It was empty.

Young and his girlfriend, Kristin Lorentz, also a senior VP with Vining Sparks, had been looking at homes in the area for months. They hadn’t found a single house that met all the needs of their combined families, but Young instantly recognized potential in the vacant property, which didn’t even have a sign in the yard.

He went back to his car, did an online search, and in no time he was on the phone to the home’s owner, who lived in California.

“I told him, ‘You don’t know me, but I think I’m standing outside your house,'” Young said.

The owner, who’d rented the property out after an unsuccessful attempt to sell it, was getting set to put the house back on the market. He told Young where to find a key, and within two hours, they’d negotiated a price.

Young called Lorentz and said, “You’ve got to come here now.”

“I didn’t want to go right then,” she said, laughing. “We’d been looking for so long, and we’d seen so many houses that were all kind of the same. “He was like, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m making an offer.’ “

As soon as she saw the house, Lorentz was as smitten as Young. The couple contacted Realtor John Stamps of Prudential Collins-Maury, who’d shown them dozens of houses and who’d worked with Young on the sale of two previous homes. Right away, Stamps began working to put the deal together.

“I was in my car,” Stamps said. “I drove over that night so I could get a feel for it. I called (the listing agent) and said, ‘Well, it sounds like we might already have a deal.'”

That was on a Sunday. By Tuesday, Young and Lorentz had a contract.

The house was perfect for the family for a long list of reasons. First and foremost, it had the space and privacy they wanted for their children, Young’s son Austin, 14, and Lorentz’s daughters Genevieve, 8, and Ainsley, 6.

“Every house we seemed to look at wasn’t conducive to our family,” said Young of the couple’s search. “Most had the master bedroom down and all the other bedrooms up. This house has three bedrooms downstairs with the master on one side and the girls’ rooms on the other side. Each has her own room. And there are two bedrooms up, so my son has a room to himself and his own bathroom.”

Not only that, but the house had not one, but two upstairs bonus rooms. There was a space for Austin to watch TV, play video games and hang out with friends and a separate space for the girls to play.

“When we found this house, we just couldn’t believe it,” Lorentz said. “It was just built for this family. Austin is allowed to be his age and have his privacy, and my girls are allowed to be their age and romp and scream, and everybody’s happy.”

The couple purchased the five-bedroom, 41/2 -bath home in Collierville’s Fairways neighborhood in August for $495,568.

Between the two of them — Lorentz had lived in Southwind and Young had lived in Collierville’s Almadale Place — they had all the furniture they needed. The only new piece the house required was a sofa for the hearth room.

Just off the entry, a formal dining room features a round table with six chairs, a china cabinet and a red velvet settee that’s tucked into one corner. The couple replaced the room’s chandelier along with several other light fixtures — one of very few changes they’ve made to the house.

“We replaced the lighting and we added the window treatments,” Young said. “We put in a backsplash. That’s all we’ve had to do.”

A formal living room contains an oversized green settee and an oval coffee table with a marble top. A large floral painting above a tall chest adds a dramatic pop of red, creating a focal point in the space.

The kitchen is central to the house and features a center island, cream-painted and glazed cabinetry, granite countertops, a built-in desk and the new stone backsplash. It’s open to the hearth room, which has a fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves and plenty of space for the family to gather.

“We wanted one big area where everyone could meet,” Young said. “This is by far my favorite room in the house.”

“We both work full-time, and the kids are in school,” Lorentz added. “Family time is so important because we don’t have a ton of it. We love this room.”

Just off the hearth room, a side hallway leads to the girls’ rooms, one of which serves as a guest room for now because the girls prefer to share. The two rooms are separated by a Jack-and-Jill bath.

Across the house, the master suite includes a double-sided fireplace that looks into the spacious bedroom and sits above the bath’s whirlpool tub.

“This bathroom would have been enough to sell most people on the house,” Lorentz said. “We got everything else, the right floor plan for our family, and this too.”

Upstairs, Austin’s room has its own full bath. His nearby playroom has two chairs set up in front of a flat screen for gaming, a sofa and an area with built-in cabinetry and a sink. The girls’ playroom, also upstairs, has space for TV watching, playing and even practicing gymnastics.

They’re turning one corner of the room into a “beauty salon” complete with a salon chair.

Lorentz said she’s happy the family waited to buy until they’d found exactly the right house for them.

“Holding out was a good thing,” she said. “There is so much out there, and we almost settled. I would say don’t settle, because we just found something perfect.”