Yes, We Still Own Property in Pinal County...For Now!

Going on fifteen years ago now (ack! We're old!), Chris and I got married in November 2003, while we were living in Jacksonville, Florida.  At the same time, he was also serving his final days in the Navy, and the Navy has this cool deal where when you're done, if you leave in good standing, they'll pack you up and move you back to where you enlisted or any closer distance.  Since he enlisted in his hometown of Sacramento, we pretty much had a free move anywhere in the continental United States.  After looking at cost of living, employment opportunities, housing costs, educational institutions, and several other factors, we settled on Phoenix as our next port of call, and in January 2004, we made our move, driving several days across the country with two cars and just as many dogs.

Specifically, these two dogs.

Don't they look happy wearing our shirts?

We rented an apartment in Mesa right off the 60, and for a year, we got jobs, enrolled in school, and generally spent some time figuring out where we wanted to live in the area (before we got the jobs, we spent almost every day checking out books at the library and hiking South Mountain - free stuff is the best stuff).  Since Chris had his eye on the engineering program at UofA in Tucson, while I worked in Phoenix, we signed an agreement with Beazer Homes in Casa Grande, a city about halfway between the two major urban areas.  In February 2005, we moved into our brand new house in the desert, and we happily lived there for the next five and a half years.  Once Chris graduated (from ASU instead of UofA - life, am I right, man?) and got his job at Gore, on the veerrrrry north side of Phoenix, we looked into moving again, since he wasn't interested in a two plus hour commute each day, each way.

Enter the Peoria house, which we moved into in the late summer of 2010.  When we moved further north, we looked into selling the CG house, but the market at the time was totally and completely tanked, and we'd end up losing way more money than we could stomach if we sold the house at the time.  Instead, we tried our hands at being slumlords, and we signed an agreement with Norris Management, a property management group in the CG area.

Since then, particularly since we've now picked up and crossed state lines, every once in a while, one of us will float the idea of whether it's finally time to consider selling the CG house - the property values have increased, and now that we have ten years of equity in the house, we could come out positive in the equation, even after closing costs and the like.  Each time when we've thought about it, we always consider the issue with having renters on the property; while we know it's OUR house, it still seems kinda jerky to boot people out with only 30 days notice (our renters were month to month at this time), and we feared what negatively motivated folks might do to the place.

Chris put in a call to Norris to see what might be possible, and as it turned out, our long-time renters were moving out at the end of March, and replacements had not yet been found for them.  A few weeks earlier, Chris received a flyer in the mail for a realtor who also handles home renovations, which works out particularly well for us, since we can't stop in and check on the house every few days.  It really seemed like providence was telling us now was the time!

The Friday after Easter, Chris took the day off and hopped in the truck for the journey back to the middle of the desert; he got the keys from Norris (if you need property management in AZ, check them out - they are really great - responsive, fair, and friendly) and met with our new realtor, Dayv, who discussed the repairs/renovations he'd suggest making to the house.  We signed a contract with Dayv, stating exactly how much money we'd let him spend in updating the house; he and Chris decided on this together (along with my far-flung spousal okay), and essentially, Dayv and his firm float us a zero percent interest loan until he sells the house, at which point, the loan money comes back to him after the close of escrow.  

Chris spent the rest of Friday taking a zillion pictures of the house, in all of its ten-year old glory, and texting several of them to me.  Before I deluge you with them, here's a text exchange of my favorite:

Eeeeeewwwwww.

Overall, things look good!

The kitchen and back door

Countertops will be updated,

but cabinets will likely stay as is.

The intrepid photographer

Apparently, the aloe plant and

mesquite tree were the only items alive

in the back yard.

It's damn hard to kill an aloe plant.

We got pictures from Dayv a few days ago

with a bunch of new, fresh grass in this area.

Shiny.

Chris spent the rest of Friday hanging out at Lowe's and Home Depot, picking up all sorts of exciting things - mainly new light fixtures, as the ones in the house were all rather outdated.  On Saturday morning, our buddies Matt and Jake did us a huge solid by making the trek down to CG and helping Chris fix multitudes of small things in the house, cleaning, and spending pretty much the entire day there.

New light fixture pics:

Ooh!

Aah!

After dinner on Saturday, grabbed on the way north to Jake's house, the gentlemen cleaned up and chilled out for the rest of the night, and Chris was back on the road by about 9:30 or 10 on Sunday morning, heading back to the LBC.  Allegedly, all of the work done by Dayv and his dudes should be finished up by the end of this week, and the house should go on the market very soon!  If you want to pick up a recently refurbished smaller house in the CG, let us know, and if not, pray some Canadians snatch it up quick!

Later!

Amy