Six Months In Our Forever Home

On July 22, 2025 we closed escrow on our new Forever Home in Hesperia / Oak Hills and started moving in, so as of today it’s been six months.

We’re still loving the mountain and desert views, especially with snow on Mt San Antonio (Old Baldy).

It hasn’t all been peppermints and rainbows and unicorns (although we’ve had our share of rainbows, which is nice!). The Christmas Eve downpour that left the interior courtyard flooded and overflowing into the garage was probably a low point. And along with home ownership comes the joy of home repairs. I LOVE fixing toilets when they stop flushing! *sarcasm*

I miss some of the birds we had in West Hills which we don’t have here, but we’ve got quite the flock of sparrows and finches here (as long as I remember to fill the feeders regularly) as well as crows and hawks and owls, so it’s still pretty good. And we have our squirrels.

We’ve met a number of our neighbors and gotten onto the neighborhood group text connection. We’ve started participating in local events and have plans for more in the upcoming year. All good.

One realization that came to me a couple of days ago, which probably has a big impact on my appreciation for and enjoyment of our Forever Home, is that this is the first place I’ve EVER lived which I actually chose. Ever since I was 18 and moved out of my parents’ house in 1975 I’ve lived in apartments (where I took what I could find, or afford, but they weren’t what I wanted), rented homes, the home we bought that we were already renting and living in, the house we rented because we stumbled on it with just days to go before we HAD to move and the only other option was to go back into an apartment… Every place I’ve lived has been a compromise, settling for whatever I could get. Some of those weren’t terrible – the Pomelo house where we stumbled onto the rental through a connection with a co-worker, then bought when we were already living there, was a great place, we lived there over 30 years, but it was still a product of chance and luck and one stumbling step after another, not choice.

The Forever Home is the place we chose after something like four years of looking (including homes all over the country in Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, Arizona, Washington…) and Hesperia’s the community we found and liked.

We’re good!