Forever Home – July 01st

A little over seven years ago we sold the house I and the kids had lived in for nearly 30 years, and moved into a much smaller rental house. It was an ordeal, to say the least. Look for posts in April and May of 2018, many of them named “Moving Out & Moving On.” There was more than a little bit of panic at times since we were in escrow and ***HAD*** to be out by a certain date, and we didn’t have a new place to live or move into until we stumbled on our current home by accident, and we had so much “stuff” that, even with massive amounts of throwing stuff out and culling (a lot of which pains me to this day), we ended up with several storage spaces.

I hate renting. It’s just burning money every month, paying for someone else’s tax breaks and property value appreciation and mortgage. I remember at the time that I was hoping we could buy a house and get back into our own home in “a couple of years.”

Obviously that didn’t happen. But over the last three years or so I’ve been actively looking for that “forever home,” where we can make one last move, then live for the rest of our lives in our own little paradise. At first I wasn’t even limiting the search to LA, or even to just California. Online (Zillow, primarily) I’ve looked at properties in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Virginia, central Illinois, and many other places. Hundreds of online listings, if not thousands.

Eventually we focused our search on California. Even then it’s been wide ranging, since CA is not a small state. San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, the Central Valley areas of Fresno, Stockton, Bakersfield, the coastal areas of Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Maria, the desert and Inland Empire areas… Again, easily 1000+ listings got reviewed, many saved for future reference.

Recently we’ve again narrowed our focus to the “High Desert” area at the top of the Cajon Pass, on the I-15 about halfway between LA and Las Vegas. Victorville, Hesperia, Apple Valley. I had a pilot and NASA friend who lived there, and one of the Virtual Railcam webcams that I like is set up there. I was intrigued. Last May we actually spent a weekend there, and we’ve looked at a LOT of houses virtually.

Having decided that THIS was the year we needed to get off the dime and actually make it happen, my pace of searching and reviewing has picked up. We’ve been talking to a realtor, and we’ve gone as far as to get prequalified. We’re ready!

There have been a couple of extremely nice houses that had open houses, but I couldn’t afford the time off to go up for a weekend (it’s 2-3 hours each way, about 100 miles) due to my work deadlines. A couple of those properties that were particularly inviting and promising got sold in the last two weeks before we ever even got a chance to look at them. That was a big disappointment.

Moving on, and with the worst of the work deadlines almost met, I thought we had time to go back up this weekend. We had 8-9 homes that had open houses and while all of them seemed to have at least a couple of “yellow flags” at least (HOA, too small, too expensive, too little land, out on a dirt road, etc) we figured it would be a good data collection exercise. Then the first house we looked at caught us like a thunderbolt. It was magnificent.

Not perfect. It’s at the top end of our price range, I was hoping for a little bit more land, and I was sort of hoping for something in a different part of town so that it would be closer to stores, the Post Office, restaurants, and so on. Still, these were inconveniences, not deal killers.

When we got back home yesterday, we asked our agent to make an offer. This morning the Seller counter offered, and we knew that there were other offers on the table. We counter-counter offered, figuring if it wasn’t meant to be, as much as we had “house lust,” we could walk away and keep looking.

To my amazement and surprise, they accepted our offer. We open escrow tomorrow with an EXTREMELY AGGRESSIVE 21-day escrow.

Now the fun begins. We don’t have to be out of this house until September 1st, but if we’re paying the mortgage on the Forever Home starting in late July, I really don’t want to also be paying rent here any longer than we have to. We need to be packing and getting ready to move out in three weeks like all of the demons of Hell were whipping us onward.

Assuming no surprises or disasters, in three weeks we need to be ready to start living out of the new house, get all of our utilities and services set up, get movers in here and get all of our stuff up there, and on and on and on.

July may have just started, but it just got a LOT more busy and exciting than it was 48 hours ago.

Still a number of things that can go wrong, but I’m confident. It’s going to be madness and chaos up to our eyeballs, but when it’s done we’re going to be in a lovely place for the rest of our lives. It’ll be a slice!