Hello there friends, and welcome back to another nonsense adventure! This week, I wanted to tell you all about the hunting trip I’ve been on for the last many weeks. That’s right, I said hunting trip. No, not for a Winchester. No, not for a fluffy animal of any kind. But for a house!
(Note: as I wrote the above, the entire thing was said in an Australian accent in my head…)
That’s right! I’ve been house hunting! And let me tell you, finding an affordable, decent-sized house in Denver right now is about as hard as catching sight of a jack-a-lope, or a yeti, or a unicorn. Actually getting one of those houses under contract is as hard as taming one of the aforementioned fictional creatures!
So, Colorado right now is “the shit”. Like, in the best way, apparently, because everyone and their neighbors have been flooding into the good ol’ CO. The biggest offenders have been California (can’t blame them for wanting to get out), Texas (um… I guess it’s even hotter down there, or whatever), and Arizona (same reason as Texas, I’d imagine). With them, they’re bringing their stupid money from selling their old stupid houses, and making things more “interesting” around here.
Let me start by telling you about my old house. It was a three bedroom, two bathroom, 1,600 square foot home that needed lots of work. The Hubs and I ignored the “the roof is totally bad” warning, and bought the house in 2012 for about $150K.
(Note: the roof was actually fine – and we got a new one anyway after the mega-hail a few years later.)
Fast-forward to 2021.
Hubs and I did a little work to the house. We painted, we got a new roof, new water heater, we redid my office and the laundry room – but we didn’t do too much in the grand scheme of things. We’re just not handy people. Crafty and creative does not equate to handy. But still our house went under contract within a week for $420K. Maybe our house was someone’s Yeti. <3
So yay, cool, woo-hoo. We have money to take with us to use as a downpayment for the next house. But you can imagine, if my little fixer-upper was now going for over $400K, then what we wanted to upgrade to was also going to be that much more expensive. What would have been a $400K house just five years ago is now listing at $600K or more. And pretty much any house goes for well over the asking price.
And so the hunt began. And it did not begin well. I caught sight of some real jack-a-lopes, but they’d literally go under contract before we even got a chance to see them in person. So we got more organized and aggressive – and it was mostly not pretty. Lots of donkeys dressed up like unicorns, or lipizzaner stallions that we could never afford. But no real unicorns…
Until we saw past the glamour magic, and realized we’d found a unicorn. A four bedroom, two bathroom, 2,100 square foot unicorn that was dark and funky and totally my style. I could never be happy with a simple, pure white unicorn with flowing pearlescent locks. No, I want a black unicorn, with a blood red mane and a devil’s tail – and that’s what this house is. It’s an older, battleworn unicorn, for sure – but still a unicorn. The hunt has ended, but the taming now begins..
(Note: taming, in this case, means signing ridiculous mountains of paperwork, having all the experts look through the house, signing more paper, and then waiting… but yeah, we’re taming our unicorn.)
