My Hat’s Off To You!

This past Spring my wife and I made a huge decision. I actually hinted at it in this prior blog post.  After spending the last 10 years in our first home, we decided to move.  Oddly, our new home was only 2 houses down the street from our old home, but it was a perfect opportunity to move up to a larger home without leaving the neighborhood and friends we’ve come to adore.  After all, real estate is all about location, and we feel we have a pretty awesome location.

The transaction was a piece of cake. After all, I do it every day. The inspections, the loan approval, the paperwork all came naturally.  But when it came time to actually move, I was not prepared for the physical toll and time commitment it would take to settle in.

On the first day of moving we had our 3 kids “helping.” Within the first hour our 1-year old, Ollie, had wandered off, shattered a light bulb on the dining room floor, and scraped himself up walking into unfamiliar rose bushes. It was in those first moments we knew things were going to be tough.  We’ve been in our new home for 3 months now, and the garage is still a disaster.  We keep moving furniture around to find the right place for everything.  We have half a dozen boxes still sitting at the bottom of the stairs.  And we simply moved down the street!!

The funny thing about all of this is I’m an expert at every step of the home buying process, right up until I hand you the keys and say “congratulations!” I equate it to an OBGYN doctor who delivers a newborn to first time parents.  The doctor works a seeming miracle bringing a new life into the world, but unless they have kids of their own the doctor has no idea the sacrifices and adjustments new parents will make on behalf of their new baby.

So my hat is off to you. I have a whole new level of respect and awareness for my clients who willingly cross the battlefield of moving on the road to homeownership.  From now on, my congratulations will come with much more understanding of what’s to come.  As such, I’d like to help with your next move.

One of the most time-consuming things we dealt with in our move was assessing and repairing sprinklers. Sprinkler systems are not checked in a routine home inspection, yet they are an important piece to your landscaping health and appearance.  When you buy a home with me in the Folsom or surrounding area, I’ll provide a sprinkler assessment inspection from the Sprinkler Repair Guys, a locally owned and operated company that I personally know and work with.  Having a knowledgeable resource for a system that will inevitably need some tweaking will be a small way to help you make your next move just a bit easier.