A note I wrote yesterday…
Moving day.
We moved into our rental in Nov 2020 after selling our house during COVID thinking we would leave CA.
The next few years had interesting twists…
I was at Parallax doing the WFH thing. My team moved to CO. We all sold our houses at the same time and even used my same realtor friend. In the meantime, we needed a place to stay. The realtor called her childhood friend who she knew had this house vacant.
They agreed to rent it to us. An old groovy Boogie Nights house. It needs (A LOT of) TLC but I describe it as a rich person’s house from 1969. Anyway, we figure it’s temporary. So as things start opening up we visit Denver/Boulder on a majestic weather weekend. Looks great.
We get back home and Denver weather made national news. It was 80 and sunny and they had a snowstorm the next day. I text @Elfonzerelli:
“bruh, the weather?”
Apparently that can happen.
Egyptian blood gets cold feet. I’m out on CO. I myself am a snowflake. I don’t need them in September.
Summer 2021, we travel for about 7 weeks in the US, including a month in TX visiting friends. We spend 4th of July in Austin and on the way back to our friend’s house in DFW area we swing by an open house. We called the realtor on the way to make sure she’ll be there. She warns us there’s 3 offers on the place already. No problem. We are looky loos and it’s next to our friend’s house so we still wanna look.
We step inside, love it immediately and the price seemed cheap (adjusting for coming from CA and TX property tax even).
I ask my friend who knows the market what’s the worst he thinks we could rent it out for. Satisfied we lift the house paying 12% thru ask. As we celebrate that week we tell our friends we will rent it out …but move there in a year!
We return to CA.
So it’s now spring of 2022.
We have the move to TX as this unspoken deadline in the back of our minds. Yinh and I are driving up to Napa. A telekinesis moment as we were driving thru the beautiful valley…I don’t remember who spoke first, the words could have been either of us:
“we can’t go to Texas”
Immediate agreement.
We do love it here. Our family is here. I left work a few months earlier, still not much of a plan, and while TX would have been way better financially, everywhere has warts…dealing with the high cost was the thing we’d rather bear.
We commit to CA then. No more wandering eyes. We sold the house in TX.
[Almost top ticked it but our first buyer backed out the week the market first dropped in 2022. We ended up eventually selling for about a 25% profit and that luck parlayed into more bc we jammed the proceeds into XHB in what turned out to be the low — long-time readers remember this as I wrote about in real time. It was a weird trade bc I got the inkling that year that I wanted to short builders, bc after talking to our TX tenants and their experience with buying a house from a builder I understood how the builders seemed squeezed on both demand bc affordability and supply cost inflation. They were like a broken crack spread. So I wanted to buy puts. But when I looked at the performance of REITs and other RE plays they were all flattish while the builders were crushed. Figuring they were now hated and be it that we were now “short a house” I held my nose and bought them! Anyway, dumb luck. Sold ’em after the 1 year mark from the basis.]
Anyway life again.
In late ’22, we are having “Sunday coffee with neighbors in the shared driveway” and learn that the tenants whose backyard is adjacent to us are moving out. We don’t know them, but our neighbor tells us. We walk to the house, introduce ourselves and discover the house isn’t listed yet. We call Yinh’s sister in SF.
“You have to move here”
This was out of left field.
We badger her and her husband all evening.
They agreed to come see it that week. By Friday they sign the lease. The 4 adults, 4 kids and grandma sharing 2 adjacent homes.
We remove part of the fence. Compound.
When my kids moved into our rental they were in COVID homeschool pods. Pre-K and 2nd grade. Tuesday, they go into 4th and 7th. These were big years. They will always remember the years “when they lived with their cousins.”
I’ve probably lived the best 2.5 years of my life. I’m sad to leave this house. The memories spanned important years (not to mention my own leaving work transition).
But today…the fence is mended.
We sleep in the new house tonight. It’s just around the corner, 3 min by bike, 8 walking. Kid goes to the same bus stop.
But this house and compound arrangement needed a tribute.
We hear our new neighbors are empty nesters. Our backyards are adjacent. We own the new place and would happily max lever to make the compound happen again but this time… permanently.