Still here!

Yep, it’s been a white hot minute since I’ve blogged. I figure this will be a multi-part series, so make sure you’re subscribed to notifications. Try to keep up. It’s been an interesting 3 years.

2019: Part I

Once upon a time, when we planned on moving north, we were told it never snows here. I’m sure they meant, “it doesn’t snow much,” or maybe “it doesn’t snow often.” Either way, it seems their definition of never is different from mine.

Snowmageddon 2019 saw over 2 feet of snow pile up over the course of 2 days. School and work shut down for two weeks. It was brutal. But the girls’ first snow days were a bit fun because they got to sled/tube and submit themselves to frostbite. Y’know, like every red-blooded American kid in the frigid winter.

Looking at the end of the school year brought a decision: it was time to move to house of our own. The market here in the greater Seattle area is nothing like anywhere else in America. You make half-million-dollar (or more) decisions in minutes or hours. It happened to us, and since we closed on the house, I’ve regretted it.

This house does not spark joy, Marie Kondo. Not at all.

So, what happened?

Right before the snowpocalypse, we purchased a travel trailer. It’s been one of our major goals: go camping! You can be at the ocean, in the mountains, or in another state or country in under 4 hours. The driving force to move out of Texas was to camp comfortably and be able to go in any direction.

It’s part of our family now. It’s going to take us places and has been our prototype for the trailer we will eventually decide to purchase when we retire and hit the road full time. Naturally, we need a place to park it!

So, moving out of the basement apartment was the first step. We needed a home large enough for all 4 of us with a place to park our rig. We wanted to have something flat enough to have a semi-permanent site, especially in the off-season, but for extra room for guests.

Recreation is huge here. Like, Trump-level “yuge.” Every third house seems to have a boat or trailer parked out front.

We found a realtor to help navigate this insanely priced market and couldn’t believe that our budget was in the $400k range. I felt like the couple on House Hunters whose budget is $1M, and she does cosmetic tattooing while he’s a professional parasailer. Like… who can afford this?

Turns out, its us. We can.

Throughout the search process, we told our real estate agent the #1 priority was RV parking. We were willing to sacrifice on a little bit to get that, whether it was the size of the house, the price, or anything. We’d take it all into consideration.

After having two offers fall through, we finally found this house. It was perfect. Four bedrooms, over 2,000 square feet, and protected on one side by a green belt or “NGPA,” which meant we had tall trees, wildlife, and no neighbors on one side. The same side there’s a nice, flat strip of yard to park the trailer. Score! It was slightly out of our budget, and the extra bedrooms are smaller than some isolation cells on Riker’s Island, but we can make do. It has a park/swingset play area across the street for The Bug (who loves that kind of stuff) and is technically walking distance to The Bird’s school.

Now, here in the great white northwest, there’s something called an ‘offer review date’ which means you have to outbid other people prior to this date. Houstonians will appreciate the fact that you see a house, you go buy it. It’s like going to the store. If it’s there, it’s yours. Some houses stay on the market 9 days. Others 49 days. Maybe more. You go see it once or twice, talk it over, make an offer under list price, negotiate, and everyone wins.

Because of a combination of a migration of technical workers to our area, the lack of affordable housing in Seattle proper, and generally no houses available to purchase anyway, people are looking at outlying areas in the suburbs. This creates a supply/demand issue which is great for sellers but puts buyers in a very precarious position.

I kept skipping over this house because the yard photo on the listing was weird. But it finally popped up often enough, I figured we’d go see it. We walked in around 4pm, and the offer review time was that same day at 7pm. It had been on the market for a week, but we went down to the wire unknowingly.

Knowing what we know now, our agent had several responsibilities, which she failed to satisfy.

Her first was to completely review the deed restrictions (or CCRs as they are called here: Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions) to determined the legality of RV parking. Another was to inform us that an offer review date means absolutely nothing in the hands of the right negotiator. We felt pressured to make a decision to spend $425,000 on a house we had toured one time for 15 minutes.

Looking back, I should have seen the red flags. Every house we went into, I’d see a feature I’d love and mention it, and she’d say, “Great! Let’s put in an offer!” There was little discussion about how the house fit our needs, there was no talk of inspections, or what kind of financing we were looking at. Half the time, Holton wasn’t even with me, so a decision like that was days away.

But we trusted her. She knew the market. She always kept us updated with a list of houses to consider. We were new in town, and we needed a navigator. She was local. We trusted her.

It was at this moment, she knew she screwed up.

– Narrator

Buying the house in June meant that we had the summer for the girls to get settled and looking forward to getting established in their forever home with their forever schools.

Excitement turned to dread on closing day. We signed over our down payment, scribbled on the dotted line, headed out the door, and headed to lunch, where the discussion turned to moving day and finally getting on with feeling like permanent Washingtonians. Later the same day, we got a call from our agent saying she “finally” got the CCRs from the Homeowner’s Association. RV parking was not allowed.

The sale had been done. The deed had been recorded at the courthouse. Now what?

Stay tuned for Part II.