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...