Settling in-ish

So, I'm here and settling in. I got a new mattress (omg rock hard..but I think we'll be happy together) and I'm being pretty productive working from home. I've started doing my new job duties and they're going to be engaging and challenging, so fingers crossed on the work front.

Socially I've been able to meet up with some friends, which has been lovely. Until today autumn has been amazingly gorgeous and I've enjoyed walking or biking around my current neighborhood just soaking it in.

I'm a bit discombobulated, for sure. Saturday night I had no plans, and if I were home in my own space I would have cooked or baked or watched a dvd and knitted; here I'm not really set up for those activities. So I played a bunch of online scrabble with a friend and read a bit. I've requested several more titles from the library so I'll have more options on my quiet evenings.

I definitely miss my coworkers - online interaction is not nearly the same - and I didn't expect that I'd miss having people to actually talk about my day to day work with. My housemate asks, and I can tell him a bit, but it's not the same. I just spent 6 years with people who live and breathe the same job I do, so of course I feel a bit adrift from that common experience!

None of this feels real yet, and I think it won't until I'm in my own digs. I'm still watching the market but have done some math and think I'll be better off if I can stay put in my rental until after the holidays. So unless the absolute perfect thing hits the market, I don't think I'll be making any abrupt moves just yet. Given the whirlwind of the last few months that is definitely for the best!

So, that happened

Well, look at that! In some sort of bizarre folding of space and time, I now live in Portland instead of the Bay Area.

The move went pretty well, but yeah .. I had a lot of stuff. I ordered a 12-foot truck but was given a 16-footer instead. The movers said I probably wouldn't have fit in a smaller truck, though I DID wind up just tossing in some furniture I'd intended to get rid of, so there was some leeway they didn't know about. On the other end of the trip I'd booked a 5x10 storage unit, and man is that thing stuffed to the gills!

The actual trip was reasonably painless. A friend was driving my car, and I drove the truck (aren't I brave? well no, not really - the truck's cab was air conditioned, so I kinda screwed my friend! ...I did offer to trade later on but he declined). I'd estimated we'd be pulling out of my driveway at 3pm on move day (Thursday), and we would have been perfect except for when I obeyed my building manager's instructions and locked my keys in my apartment...but I forgot to free my car from the locked garage first! And we didn't realize it until we'd exited the building! Fortunately my friend got the mail carrier to let him into the building and I was able to track down one of the few people home on a weekday afternoon, and he opened the garage for me. Whew! So that only delayed our start by about 15 minutes.

The first day we drove as far as Redding (about four hours north), arriving around 8pm. Friday we had a leisurely morning, first in Redding hanging out with our host, and then about an hour north in the scenic town Dunsmuir. Our goal was Corvallis, and we arrived around 8:30pm. On Saturday we had another slow start to the day,  having breakfast with our host, and headed north around 11. We rolled into my storage unit just south of town at 12:45, and two friends met us there at 1.

Unloading the truck took just over an hour - I'm SO grateful to have had help! - and the unit is literally full to the ceiling. I could possibly extract things if I must, but hopefully I can just let it sit there until I am ready to move.

Then my friends came to my new digs and helped unload the last of my stuff, and we got beer.

I'm renting a room from a friend and it's taking a little time to get it organized - my clothes are unpacked, and the ingredients for a delicious drink a friend taught me, but otherwise I have boxes and last night I slept on a bedroll on the floor, since my host's air mattress was killing my back. Tomorrow, my new mattress arrives and I may never get up again!

Working from home is going pretty well, though I have to work out a better ergonomic situation. Settling into Portland doesn't feel at all real yet... I will write more about that later.

Time is collapsing in on itself

Is it a black hole when time magically compresses itself? There must be one nearby, then .. and I wish it would visit my apartment and save me the work of packing!

• In April a job was posted at my company that I knew I could do and thought I wouldn't hate.
• In May I applied and told my company that much of my motivation was that I'd be moving to Portland by the end of the year and couldn't do my current job remotely. While I'd been hoping to return to Portland from the moment I left, this was my first real step in making it happen.
• In June I learned an external candidate got the job but was assured they'd figure something out for me.
• In July I learned a slot had been added for me on the team to which I had applied. I also let them know that I was changing my move date from the rather vague "end of year" to end of September. Suddenly time was of the essence; my current job got posted while I was on vacation.
• In August I learned who was applying for my current job.
• In September my boss interviewed and selected and should be announcing my replacement next week.

Suddenly I realize that the next time I'm at work, I'll have seven days left in the office. Two weeks from now the move will be behind me and my stuff should be in storage.

Honestly, my head is a bit spinny now!

Someone bought "my" house!

Dangit. Remember how I was playing it cool and not REALLY stalking any specific house? Well, I lied. There was one I was pretty interested in, with a 95 walk score and 1.5 miles from my three friends. It was listed in my price range and had been on the market just over 100 days - and as of last night, it's pending!!!

Ah well. That means I have time and don't have to spring into action the second I arrive in Portland. It gives me more time to save money - renting from my friend for a few months is going to help a lot in that department! It looks like I'll be able to save as much as half of my take-home pay every month I'm with my friend, if I'm pretty stringent. I suppose I might tour a few houses when I get up there, but I haven't seen any other house quite as interesting as that one. One of my friends assured me there will always be more houses - I am sure he's right.

In other news I've been a packing fiend (or at least I was over the weekend). I think I'm doing a good job - I winnowed my games and actually threw out some photo albums. I also recycled all my papers from grad school, and a pile of really not-very-good college poetry. In the unlikely event I have a biographer..well, he or she will have to work a bit harder now!

It's really weird to pack all my stuff with no idea when or where I'll see it again. I'm going to rent a storage unit and can visit it to retrieve things, but that's not likely to happen much. I'm going to have my clothes, work files, and a few kitchen things at my new space (namely my food processor and KitchenAid mixer). Everything else: see ya eventually!

I feel pretty sure I'll be doing even more weeding on that fine fine day I unpack.

What I'm using for house shopping

Since I haven't yet moved (and don't get me started on the process of packing...), I'm doing some long-distance online house shopping, mostly to get a feel for the market*.

I've got three different apps loaded on my iPod touch: redfin, realtor.com, and zillow. I'm using the favorites feature in both redfin and realtor.com, which helps me keep track of different houses. I also like that I can tell it to NOT show certain houses, so I'm not revisiting listings for houses I've discounted (because they need too much work, usually).

Once I've found a house I'm curious about, I use Google maps to zoom in closely to check out the neighborhood, yards, and surrounding houses. Then I use street view to "walk" up and down the street a little (and as a bonus, I think I found a sour cherry tree near one house! I'm definitely planning to do some walkbys in the spring/early summer to see about harvesting some cherries). Anyway, cruising through the neighborhoods is kind of fun and gives me a small feel for the area.

Finally, I use walkscore.com to assess the general area. I currently live in an apartment that gets a 91 (walker's paradise) and I really love that I can spend an indefinite period of time in my 'hood without having to drive. Right now I can walk to the grocery store and library, and there are at least 20 restaurants and four coffee shops nearby - and a yarn store, post office, and movie theater! I can't hope to afford to buy something in such a great neighborhood in Portland, but I DO want to have at least a couple coffee shops and restaurants nearby, and would prefer to have a grocery store within a half-mile if possible.

A personal factor is that I have three friends who live quite near each other in one part of town: two houses within a block of each other, and a third person less than a half-mile from the first two. I currently live walking distance from four friends and would like to have something like that in my new life too. I really do want it all!

So, my criteria are: price, location, and condition - like every other buyer in the world, I know!


* Oh, fine, I'm not really "getting a feel for the market" I'm totally torturing myself by stalking certain houses...

Calendar: September

My September calendar shot is another one from last summer's trip to Greece, and it's not the last time pictures from that trip will be featured this year! What can I say, but that Greece is extremely photogenic.

I took this picture on the Acropolis, but I can't say for certain which building it's attached to! I can picture where I was standing when I took the picture, and I think that this is a column on the Erechtheion, more famous for its Porch of the Caryatids. You can see that the part below the curve has been better protected from the elements, but it's mind-boggling to think that this was created over two thousand four hundred years ago.

House hunting: first offer - check!

Now that I've established that I'm looking to buy a house, let me tell you all about my first foray into the market.

First of all: as soon as I knew I'd be moving back to Portland, I applied with my credit union to be approved for a mortgage. Then I did some emailing with a friend and he recommended his mortgage lender so I also applied with that bank. In both cases I was approved for up to 250k. So, yay.

Of course personal finance 101 tells us not to max ourselves out on housing costs, and I don't intend to borrow that much, but it at least gives me a framework. No surprise: my frame is the very bottom of the real estate market in Portland.

I did start poking at the market a little bit: I loaded the redfin and realtor.com apps on my ipod touch and started doing searches... all the time. As I feared, my price constraints limit me to a ring well outside the close-in parts of Portland, but one of the approachable areas is near houses owned by three different friends, so that's kind of awesome.

The real estate searches I've been running are helpful, even if they make me feel silly. Last Wednesday I saw a listing that really made me sit up and take notice. It was an adorable beautifully-finished house just over a half-mile from my friends' houses. The location was otherwise crappy - extremely close to the highway and a freight train line. However it was just so amazingly cute I couldn't stop looking at it.

Long agonizing story short, I used miles to book a flight to Portland and arranged to see four houses with a randomly-chosen agent. I liked the agent quite well. One of the houses was a nightmare pit that is going to be on the market a LONG time; one had a fussy yard and an icky inside; one had good bones but was going to be a pretty big project. The fourth house, the cute one, was every bit as amazing as I thought.

My agent said they were reviewing offers that night (after a whopping 3 days on the market) and that it didn't hurt anything to offer if I wanted to. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes. She said if I thought I'd regret not making an offer, then I might want to do it. She also said it was going to go higher than the list price.

So after futzing with a calculator a bit, I decided to make an offer for 10k more than the list, with a 10% down payment. We offered 45 days to close and free week to get out of the house after that. The agent and I parted ways, and I went to my friend's house to sit by my emailbox.

About 15 minutes later an email came in; the link in it took me to an electronic version of the offer letter. I had to click to initial 11 times and that was it! (Yes, I did skim it before sending it in.) By 3pm I'd made an offer; by 9:40pm I knew I was their second choice, and by 8:30am I knew I didn't get the house. The winner(s?) had a bigger down payment and had offered the same price as I had, so it's nice to know my guess was decent.

It was disappointing but I'm mostly glad. I've decided it was an A+ house in a D+ location. I think I'll shoot for a B location and a B house and hope I can make that work. But I should probably stop monitoring the real estate sites because I can't fly up for another weekend jaunt! I can do this in earnest starting in five weeks.