I’ll miss you, sweet house.

So hey guys, sorry it’s been so quiet. We sold our house and moved to Portland, Oregon. (!)

We’d talked about leaving the Bay Area for a long time. The reasons were many. The decision was hard. But I miss my house!

As you may know, the Bay Area is going through a bubble, making real estate very valuable and making it perpetually harder to live there. We’re not getting any younger and we realized that if something happened to either of us we’d be financially screwed – almost no margin for error. So we made the decision to leave the places and people we’d both grown up with and set out for greener (literally) pastures.

We wanted to be ready to sell by the summer season and we made it. The same realtor we bought it with sold it for us last June and with all the work we’d done on the place we got a lot of offers. Selling a house is hard, both emotionally and physically but it went well. Moving to another state is hard too. The whole thing was tough but I’m glad we had the option to improve our situation.

The first six months in Portland were spent in an apartment that we rented sight unseen. It was a perfectly nice little box with zero soul, but it gave us the chance to look around and figure out where we wanted to be. We found a very good real estate agent through a co-worker who gave us the lowdown on neighborhoods and took us out. We ended up negotiating a good deal on the first house we made an offer on. Our agent fought hard for us and we got a new roof and new plumbing out of the deal. So where do we live now? Another 1890s Victorian!

I’ll show you around next time. I just wanted to get this update out, finally. It was hard to write. Thanks for showing up.