Missives from the 6th Floor

My commute to the west side of Seattle for the year and a half I worked at Real was pretty painless - walk to the bus stop at the corner, bus to the ferry, walk on to the ferry, walk to work on the other side and reverse the process to get home. If I was in a rush, I took the motorcycle and skipped the bus and the walk along the water.

Since starting to commute to the east side a year ago, the commute got less painless. Aside from taking way too long (3 hours a day total, door to door), it's much more stressful. Traffic from Bellevue to the ferry dock is unpredictable - and while I've only missed the ferry a few times in the last year, it's often a question of one stop-light, or a train crossing, that makes the difference. During the winter, I didn't have the option to walk, or to take the car (that adds another hour on average, queuing for the ferry), so I rode in pretty much everything but ice and snow. Cold, rainy, didn't matter - I was on the bike. I could totally live (longer) without that.

It's also been affecting our lives in other ways - I'm on the ferry four or five days a week (depending on if I manage to work from home on Friday), so I have little to no interest in getting on the boat over the weekend - and our side isn't exactly a hot-bed of social activity.

So Dawnise asks if I want to attend some thing or other in Seattle, I say "not really" and the situation sorta deteriorates from there.

I had lunch yesterday with the realtor we worked with to find this house when we moved up - he's going to start looking for houses, and we'll start looking at the strongest candidates.

As if on queue, the Seattle Times ran an article the other day about home prices in the Seattle area. The good news is we'd be selling in an "up" market. The bad news is we'd be buying in an "up" market.

My plan - insofar as I have a plan - is to try to find a way to get enough cash out of this house to get us into the next one before we put this one on the market. I basically hate the process of selling a house - the realtors and random people wandering in at a moments notice; the need to keep the place "show-room clean"; the risk of one of the cats escaping when someone doesn't mind the door. All of it. So assuming we find something we like, I'd like to be able to make an offer that's not contingent on our sale, move out of this place, then put it on the market.

I suspect it's possible but I'm not sure I'll be comfortable with the financial arrangements required to do so.

We'll see.

In the mean time, I spent Sunday of last weekend fixing the path that our ex-landscaper installed and was already falling apart, and this weekend I'll likely do the same for one of the retaining walls.

Other than that, the house is in good shape - we should probably get the paint out and paint the interior stairwell wall, but the fellow we had knock a window into it did a nice job - and it's easy to miss that it's not painted at first glance.