what happend to my little city?

Finding a house was a long road for The Morning Man and I.

We moved to Portland at the end of June 2015 (almost two years ago! eeek!).  We decided it was too much to try to buy a house when we first got to Portland.  After spending a pretty penny on the move we thought, "hey, let's see what neighborhoods we like before settling down in one"...cute right.

I hadn't lived in Portland since 2005, and even though I had come to visit about twice a year during my 10 year stint in Chicago, I never quite grasped how much Portland changed.  It has grown up and spread out and whether you want to blame it on Californians, or IFC's Portlandia, or just call it inevitable, it is no longer the affordable hidden gem that it once was.

So there we were saving up money for a wedding and a new home, looking up houses at a price we were sure we could afford and dreaming of the great future we were on our way to building for ourselves... then we met with the mortgage broker. wah wah. Thankfully instead of telling us what we could afford by bank standards (36% of your monthly income?! - no way!), he based the number off of what we decided we could afford per month, and it turned out our dream number wasn't based in any sort of reality (seriously, my greatest advice for anyone wanting to start the home buying process is - find out what you can afford first!). 

With our new realistic number we set out to find our new home. This is where "oh wow Portland got expensive!" and "awww, how cute you thought you could afford the nice neighborhoods" comes in.  The housing market is booming here, and the affordable properties keep getting pushed further and further to the outskirts of Portland where many native Portlandians would never consider. But with each offer came a no and each no lowered our standards and diminished our musts, so we started to look into the never-will-I-ever neighborhoods. 

If someone told me even two years ago that I would be buying a house past I-205 I would have thrown back a hearty laugh complete with an eye-roll and a slight look of disgust.

It took a full year, but on February 15th, 2017 we heard those 4 words:
Your offer was accepted.

And with that came the end of a long road.  Of course, that long road took a sharp turn into a longer more disgusting and agonizing road that neither we nor our realtor could imagine...

Oh...hello there {aka: it's been two years, is there anyone listening?}

Ummmmmmm Hi.

I don't think anyone reads this anymore, and if you do 2016 must have been quite a disappointing year (just 1 post?!?! jeez I really fell off the blogwagon).  So much has happened in our life over the past 2 years: we got engaged, moved to Portland, got married and most recently we bought a house. 

All of these are events I had dreamed of writing posts about when I first started this blog.  I remember 6 or so years ago I got really into weddings, I followed all of the hip wedding blogs, Style Me Pretty was my favorite website and I would sit at work at watch stranger's wedding videos and quietly happy-cry in my cubicle.  I couldn't wait to have a wedding of my own to prepare for so I could post all the DIYs and trails and tribulations of finding each vendor and then finally be able to reveal my wedding photos, or maybe even have my wedding featured on one of the sites that I loved.  But planning a wedding is stressful (especially when you're paying for it yourself), and time consuming and when we were in the thick of it the idea of sitting down to document my experience sounded exhausting, and TV and snacks were such a better option.

After a while even doing the nail posts became a thing of the past, I started posting the photos on Instagram and the immediate gratification of likes was so much more satisfying than writing up a blog post for my parents to read (because let's face it, they were the only followers I ever really had).

But recently we bought a house, (and it turned out to be in worse shape than we originally thought when we made our offer) so for the past two months we've been tearing it apart and making it our own.  It's been terrible and wonderful and all the emotions at once, and lately I've been thinking about how I want to remember this experience in the future.  We're already starting to forget some of the crazy stories that began this process, the details are starting to fade and our re-telling and re-telling and re-telling of the whole debacle keeps getting shorter and shorter. 

So here we are, an old platform and a new story, and if anything, this will just serve as a little journal for me to go back to when it's time to buy a new house and I think "it wasn't that hard, let's do it again!"

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