Ordinary Life: Heading, East!

Part One

The End of One Chapter

We had been looking for our “Forever Home” for over a year, ever since a vacation up to the Redwoods of Northern California and a chance booking of a home tour opened up our eyes to the possibility that we were actually much farther along in our five-year plan to move up there.

We had a certain set of criteria: minimum of eight acres, three bedrooms, no more than forty-five minutes from the coast, close enough proximity to healthcare and groceries, preferably a Victorian, room for a garden and fruit trees, and no snow; that last one was non-negotiable. We also had a long watch list on Zillow that mostly fit that criteria; at one point somewhere around two hundred and fifteen. The Victorians were few and far between, though.

Somehow we kept talking ourselves out of every single one that came close to being the one. A needed kitchen remodel here, a bathroom remodel there, too dark, odd layout, not enough trees. I think you see the trend.

Then the Pandemic arrived. We kept looking, but our list became shorter and shorter as the real estate market in California took off under the lockdowns. We raised our maximum purchase price multiple times, even going well above our comfortable price range just to see where the inventory was moving. Even then, we weren’t finding anything we liked any longer, and on the rare occasion that we did, it would still be snatched up quicker than we could act. It was like the early 2000s all over again.

Then came the news that the community of Mendocino had run into a water shortage. Since we had been looking in that general area, and from there up into Oregon, the thought of one of the wettest parts of California running low on water made us rethink our dreams of living in the Redwoods. It didn’t help that due to encroaching wildfires, some of the giant Sequoias were being wrapped in fire-resistant foil.

What we would we do if in five, ten years, our well ran dry? Or in twenty years, the wildfires were a yearly threat in what was once a damp, dense, forest of old-growth Redwoods? Would we have to abandon our Forever Home?

We were starting to lose hope of realizing that dream.

An Adventurous Start to a New Chapter

Lockdowns were in full effect, but we both had jobs that could be done anywhere, and worked for employers who were adapting quite well to the new remote work environment. We had both been made remote quite early on in the Pandemic; me in March, the first in my office to take up the offer when it was made; she a month later. Losing the forty-five minute commute each way was fine with me. She was a bit luckier in her commute as we lived a mere eight minutes from her office. We had both dreamed of working from home and that was now a reality.

My employer took the opportunity to sell the building I had worked out of, one of many he owned, which was prime real estate in the Midtown area of Sacramento. He then moved to Las Vegas. My partner’s employer owned a massive business complex in a suburban city on the outskirts of Sacramento proper, and the entire campus became a ghost town.

And we still kept looking. And talking ourselves out of every home we would pick to focus on. We would Chromecast the list onto the big screen TV on the wall in the living room so we could see each home in large, great detail. And pick it apart. This routine would go on sometimes until midnight.

At some point in this game, my partner started to look in other areas of the country that she had visited in the past and knew she liked, were we could find forested land. She broached the topic with an innocently sly “What if we moved to Vermont?”

“Vermont?!?” I replied incredulously. “You do know it snows there, right?”

“I know. Isn’t that crazy?” She stated.

Snow had long been such an out-of-bounds option that I would routinely tease her about it when we’d see a particularly snowy location on a TV show or movie we were watching, “how about if we lived there?” Her response was always a resounding, sharp “No.”

But here we were, starting a new watch list full of properties in Vermont. Which we would then thoroughly dissect and reject. We talked ourselves out of literally every property for sale in Vermont at the time that fit our criteria. Every. Single. One.

Then it was on to neighboring states. And still more of the same.

After another late-night Saturday in September of 2021 spent searching, adding, and rejecting properties in New York state, where we had landed after exhausting other states nearby, my partner proclaimed that she was done with the whole tiring, frustrating process. We went to bed shortly after midnight, disillusioned.

When the morning came and I found myself awake earlier than my partner, I thought maybe I should run a search on my laptop instead. So I snuck out of bed, into the living room, and started my own search. I would use the same criteria in the search filters, but my theory was that what was being returned was somehow curated by how we had been searching on her laptop.

My hypothesis proved to be true as there was a house in the top three on the right-hand proximity list that had been on the market for over six months but had never appeared in the search results on my partner’s laptop.

Algorithm? Maybe. The wise nudging of the Universe? Perhaps. I was excited. I had been searching for less than ten minutes, and here was one that felt right. It had acreage, more than we had been looking for. It was nearly twice the size of the home we owned at the time in California; an eleven hundred square foot house on a seven thousand square foot lot, with a dozen fruit trees of different varieties. The interior was beautiful as far as the pictures showed, and needed no immediate remodeling.

I browsed through the pictures over and over, taking my time with each one, imagining us living there. I wanted her to wake up so badly it hurt. Come on, babe. Wake Up!

I sat there on the couch with the listing up on the TV until she did finally wake up an hour or so later. When she came down the hall I told her about my search and that she should come look at this house.

“I don’t want to right now. I’m gonna go water the garden.”

I watched her walk out into the back yard, my anxiousness eating away at me. I think I found The One, I kept thinking to myself.

An excruciating forty or so minutes passed by until she came back into the house.

“Come look at this house.” I requested, once again. “You’re going to love it.”

“Fine.” She came and sat down on the couch next to me as I started to slowly scroll through the pictures on the big screen.

“Wow!” she would proclaim before asking me to return to a previous picture, many, many times. “That house is US.”

Indeed it was. It felt like us.

“Now guess how many acres it has?” I said before returning to the main listing page and scrolling down to the property facts.

“Holy shit!” She exclaimed in excitement. It was a lot more everything than we had been looking for, but not outrageously so. We spent another hour or so going over every photo to try and find this house’s weaknesses. Anything that would cause us to reject this one, too. But nothing came.

We finally looked at each other, determination in our eyes, and decided to contact one of the agents on the page.

She was gracious and offered to give us a FaceTime tour of the home. We were excited and amazed. This home wasn’t within forty-five minutes of the coast; any coast for that matter. It wasn’t Victorian; we did have much better luck having Victorians on our watch list back East than we did in California, though. And it fucking snowed. Not as much as if we had found a home we liked in Vermont, but it snowed nonetheless. Hell, it even had a Trader Joes not too far away. That was something we gave up being able to have near us in Northern California. Did I mention it snows in New York?

After the tour of the home we talked about it a little bit more and then called the agent back and asked her to submit an offer. By the end of the month our offer was accepted. We were moving to New York.

The wise nudging of the Universe, indeed.