New House
I haven’t been around much lately. It has nothing to do with not wanting to be here, but I just haven’t had free time to do much of anything. I have my usual collection of things going on, and to top that off, we bought a new house at the end of December.
We’ve been renting now for a long time. My wife and I bought our first house almost two decades ago, and the market promptly fell out from underneath of us. It wasn’t a huge deal at the time since we had no intention of moving. We figured we’d ride it out and when maybe upgrade the house when the market recovered.
Then my wife applied for a new job.
In Phoenix.
We were living in Reno.
My wife and I talked about this development, and our plans. Both of us really loved living in Reno. It’s a nice little town, and it was kind of middle ground between her family and mine. We decided that the end goal was going to be to return to Reno after a couple years in Phoenix.
We packed up our stuff, put some of it into storage and moved the rest of it down to Phoenix. We rented a place in Phoenix since we weren’t planning on sticking around long.
After a couple more years, we moved to another house in a different part of town. Better schools and all that stuff since more kids had come into the picture. We rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long. Then we had more kids and needed a bigger place to put them in. So we moved to another house. We rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long.
We really loved this house. It was a good size and configuration for us. All the kids fit nicely and they all loved their various schools. The landlord was a disaster, but everything else was good.
Then a new house showed up with a similar floorplan and size, close to the kids schools, with a pool in the back and a nicer yard and most importantly, a much better landlord. So we rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long.
Five years later, we realize that we’ve been renting in Phoenix for almost fifteen years and we are in fact going to be here long. We started looking at houses of our own. We looked for close to a year and we had a couple false starts. There was a growing level of frustration that came from constantly looking and never finding. Finally we found a place. Again, the floor plan was very similar to what we already had. The backyard was bigger and the neighborhood was nice. It was close to the kids’ schools so they wouldn’t even have to change. We jumped at it.
We closed on the 20th, and we have until the 31st of January to be out of the old house. There has been painting, and painting, and moving, and redoing floors, and purchasing appliances, and moving, and oh my god so many boxes and so much dust. Every spare moment seems to be absorbed into getting all of our stuff from point A to point B. Moving services like Internet and power. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to have most of the big stuff moved over. All the furniture and most of the general stuff. We’ll have eleven days to get things cleaned up and ready for landlord inspection and we can finally kiss the rental market goodbye.
I’m so tired right now.
Day 33 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
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