From the Mind of Trevor Stone

The timing of the whole house buying process has worked out exquisitely.

For awhile we've been talking about buying a house this spring. Last year we let our landlord know that we'd like to go month-to-month when our lease was up. But since the purchase process was really smooth, we didn't need it. We're officially moved out of Lucky Gin, and it's approximately as clean as it was when we moved in.

We smartly gave ourselves a month to move, closing on the house on the first Monday of March. That provided a weekend for moving essentials and compactly stacking boxed media, a weekend for friends and family and several large vehicles, a weekend for professional movers to pick up the heavy and/or bulky, and a week and a Saturday for all the random things that have somehow escaped packing, discarding 3-year-old containers hiding in the fridge, and extensive cleaning.

Smooth timing was a theme in the house search process, too. The first two open house we tried to go to were closed. The first one we successfully visited was super fun and we got a good vibe from the seller's realtors. We met with those two at the beginning of the year and decided to "go out with them" for a while. And although I was prepared to spend months to a year looking for a house that met our needs, timing lucked out such that we bought a house that we saw on the second weekend of outings. Total time between purchasing Buying Your First Home and actually buying our first home: less than three months.

Another timing irony, or manifestation if you prefer: for several years I had a bunch of money in a money market account rather than a higher-interest CD because I was usually in a state of "Maybe next year will be the time to buy a house." In early 2017 I decided that pattern was clearly silly, so I poked around and found that I was eligible for a credit union with a 1% APR 1-year CD and figured one year would be a good time for a house purchase, relative to the lease schedule. Getting the account set up and money moved in took a week or two longer than I expected, so the maturity date was March 8th, a bit later in the year than I was hoping. But as luck would have it, the house cost a couple hundred thousand dollars less than I was expecting to pay, so I didn't have to use any of the money from the CD. The kicker, of course, is that a couple months after I opened the CD, the savings account's interest rate increased such that I would've made more money by keeping it totally liquid.

Fortunately, we now never^* need to move again.
Well, except moving all the stuff in the garage (there's a single-human-width path down the middle) into the house, unboxing it, and moving the items destined for a garage sale back into the garage.

Some people think it's a great idea to have a yard sale before you move. I disagree: when there's a deadline on the move, it takes much less time to pack items without evaluating them, and you save on the time and stress of having all the unwanted items identified by a Saturday that you could use schlepping boxes instead. It seems much less stressful to carefully consider an item fetched from the garage, figure out how it might fit into a new space, and not announce a sale until all of the unnecessary items have accumulated.

^* Well, until it's time to retire to Moloka'i or move into an ALF.

For what is likely the last time, I rode down Wagonwheel Gap to work this morning.
Eight months of tricky Driveway access have led to some pretty extreme washboarding, so I play it safe and don't get the big gravity head start I used to.
A few grasses are settling into the bare dirt wall at the property edge that September's erosive flood carved.
The dirt sections along Wagonwheel, constructed in November, were recently touched up so the ride was pretty smooth.
The curve on Lee Hill is one lane as they build up a creek wall with cement Legos. It looks like a pretty fun gig.
The Fourmile Canyon Creek bike path finally connects to Violet from Broadway again, sporting a new bridge from the developing apartment complex to the New Urbanism of "NoBo" mixed use lofts.
There's no more mud on the street near 26th and Topaz, though there's still plenty of yard and ditch work waiting.
The Iris underpass for Elmer's Two Mile has been open for months and the rushes by the creek are starting to stand up again.
A rainbow-clad Happy Thursday cruiser ride diverted just once for high water in Boulder Creek, not atypical for late June.

As I rode along creeks and ditches to our new place in Cherryvale I reflected on how well Boulder rode out the flood. Thanks to farsighted geography and diligent planing work from folks like Gilbert White, Boulder's network of trails and paths fulfilled their buffer mission. And with the help of heavy machinery and construction crews the bike paths are springing back to life like the canyon vegetation, nourished by the damp earth.

The Anne U. White trail, appropriately named for Gilbert's wife, will take longer to regrow, with work starting next year at the earliest. The absence of that trail in the weekend experience is one reason we're moving on: walking the footpaths and quiet streets of Cherryvale is a lot more refreshing than a stroll along a dusty road that still tastes of chaos. As stressful as moving is, I'm feeling pretty good about not having owned property over the past year.