New Kids on the Block

So we bought a house! It’s pretty crazy, we are under contract on a house in Bonnie Brae. It’s a 3 bedroom, 2 bath ranch built in 1952. It has a new kitchen, an awesome backyard and ….wait for it…..a bar! We are really excited. Check out some of the pictures…….

Dining Room

Kitchen

Mmmm....Beer

Backyard

Selling a kidney to buy a home

It’s been insanely busy lately!

For starters – our place is under contract! It only took 2 weeks for an offer to come in. I countered and they accepted. Although I am not making any money on my place (I was never expecting too) I am happy with what I’m getting for it and am getting what I put into it. So now that that is done, Barb and I are frantically looking for a new place. If we can’t find a place before we close on our old place, we have a couple of friends that generously offered to let us stay at their places until we find a new place. I would rather not do that, but it’s a nice offer.

This leads me to my rant for the week…..
How do people afford homes in Denver? The market is so out of whack. I think that with Barb and my combined incomes, we make enough to afford a decent house. Apparently I am wrong. Every place we look at has something wrong with it…like a 1970’s kitchen, a toilet in the middle of the basement or a famly of squirrels living in the fireplace…………. and the sellers are asking an absurd amount of money for it…..squirrels and all. It’s perplexing. We have looked in a handful of different neighborhoods and, on average, the prices of homes has gone up by double-digit percentages per year for the last 5 years. That’s funny because I don’t think inflation, the GDP or my salary has gone up by that much each year. Am I missing something? Is there some secret to buying a home that I don’t know about? Do I have to sell a vital organ in order to afford a decent home?

Ok I’m done now. Thanks for reading

The Last Week or So

I haven’t posted in a week so here is an update on what has been going on.

Race- So the Cherry Blossom 10 Mile race was great. The race was pretty easy actually. I think I really noticed the difference in altitude. It was distracting to run past all the monuments so that helped get my mind of the fact that I was running for 100 minutes. I was able to finish in 1:41:40. So 10:10 minute miles. When I first started running I thought I would run it in 11 minute miles so I am pretty happy with that. Barb and Kristen did really well too so it was a good day.

DC – Was beautiful weather and it was great to see all our friends and meet a bunch of Barb’s friends and family who live in the area. The city is really interesting, very historic with all the US monuments and museums. My favorite monument was the FDR memorial. It is very serene with water features, quotes and statues of FDR all along the monument. I like it because instead of just being a attractive structure, it actually traces the events of his terms in office and brings to mind the era he was president. We also went to the Holocaust museum. It was very depressing but so well down, I would recommend it to everyone.

Condo – The condo is on the market and we have had about 8 showings in the first week. It’s a good sign that people are looking so hopefully we’ll hear have an offer before too long. We have been looking at neighborhood that we would potentially like to move to and it has been a little depressing. I can’t believe how expensive some of the neighborhoods in Denver are. People are asking so much money for little, dirty, dinge homes in questionable neighborhoods. If I didn’t hate it so much, I would say we should just move to Highlands Ranch and get a big, new house for less money.