Scott searches for the perfect raspberry --
will he use the same approach in selecting a house?

We are very grateful to have found an almost-new 2 bedroom apartment with a loft extremely close-in, in the Southeast.  Our apartment is a hop, skip and a jump away from the Spring Water Corridor and the East Bank Esplanade, which Scott uses to bike to work daily.  We love walking to grab coffee, see music, eat dinner or just pick up some groceries.  Our place is super convenient, but tiny.  After settling into our new jobs and making sense of a new city, we decided we were ready to start looking for a home so that we could gain some elbow room and really feel a part of a community that we love.

We asked colleagues and friends for referrals and scoured the internet for savvy agents.  We stumbled upon Living Room Realtors and immediately felt drawn to their ethos and the quirkiness of their realtor profiles.  We feel fortunate to have connected with Amber Turner to help us find our first home.  First of all, she referred us to JJ Lee Kwai of Rose City Mortgage, who was such a welcome surprise after seeking pre-approval for a home loan with several other local financial institutions.  JJ is responsive and brilliant.  She's the kind of person that you want to talk to -- how many people can say that about their mortgage lender?

Amber made sure to get to know us as people and know our values, not just our needs and wants in a home.  We respect Amber's involvement in her NE Portland neighborhood and her promotion of environmentally conscious design.  Amber has expert knowledge about the housing market and she's highly strategic.  She is also patient and has been encouraging throughout the home search process.  One of the things we love most about Amber is that she is understated and prefers to listen and let us draw our own conclusions before giving us useful feedback.  Although we have yet to find a home, we have learned quite a bit about what to look for in a home.  We feel extremely grateful for Amber's professionalism, kindness and support. 

Meredith smiles will picking a raspberry - will she be able
to keep that smile when picking a house?

Here's the nitty-gritty, since you already know our story: 

House budget: $225,000-315,000

Needs:
Close-in location
Quiet, safe street
Runnable and walkable area (coffee, grocery, parks and library are our priorities)
Over 1,000 square feet
2 beds/1bath
Well lit
Bug free
Newish roof
Safe area
No mold or water issues
Safe area
Two levels (a basement counts)
*A Puppy

Wants:
A yard
3 beds/2 baths
Move-in ready
Hardwood floors
A Garage/Off-street parking
An Upstairs
Energy efficient

*Once we buy our home

When we seriously embarked on our home search in early January, we assumed it could take a few months to find a home since the market tends to be less active in the winter.  We never imagined that there might be even fewer appealing listings at the end of March than at the beginning of January.  At the start of the home search process, I don't think we would have believed that offering $20,000 over asking price for a home in a "realistic" neighborhood wouldn't be accepted.

Questions ran through our mind after losing out on the first home we loved in early March: How can we compete in a market where homes are selling for over their appraised value?  Isn't the Great Recession still lingering - how are these bidding wars possible given the current economic context?  Can we ever hope to compete in a market with many all cash buyers?  Will we be priced out of the inner east side of Portland before we find another home we love?

With right action and intention, we do believe that things happen for a reason.  We have tried to put that first home behind us and learn from the experience.  Historically low-inventories and intensely competitive bidding wars will continue to characterize the housing market going forward and it is likely that it will take quite some time for us to find a suitable house and have our offer accepted.  In this sense, long-distance running has been apt preparation for a process that requires great endurance and strength.  Because there are so few homes to even consider (we have gone weeks without a single viable option coming on the market), we decided to channel our energy into this blog to share our love of running and our journey to home ownership.

  Smiling after a successful birthday run along
strenuous trails in Wisconsin

Of all the things we’re passionate about, running ranks right up at the top. We run almost every day for the simple satisfaction of getting out the door, pushing ourselves and letting our minds roam free.  Since we first met in 2002, we’ve grown together through running.

Many of our favorite days and experiences are based on running.  We plan special runs for our birthdays.  We reserve Saturdays for long runs together through trails or parks.  For many years, we started the New Year with a midnight run through dark and revelrous streets.

I was a member of my college cross country and track and field teams when I met Meredith.  I specialized in the 5k and 10k distances at the Division I level in college, running about 85 miles a week.  My intense passion for the sport inspired Meredith and soon she took up running. Meredith started seriously running in college and realized she had some talent after winning local 5k races and competing in an Olympic distance triathlon.  Meredith was soon the accomplished runner in the relationship.  From 2009-2010, she ran three marathons, including the esteemed Boston Marathon, where, despite dealing with an IT band injury, she still set a PR. While we both still have competitive dreams, running through the beautiful neighborhoods and trails of Portland is our focus.

While our own running is a near daily ritual, we also devote our time to other aspects of the sport. Meredith coaches middle school cross country at Catlin Gabel School and I write about the top professional runners for RunnerSpace.

Along the way, we’ve also done our fair share of race directing. Together, we put on a turkey trot in the suburbs of Chicago called the Frozen Turkey 5k. From 2009-2011, we raised nearly $20,000 for area food banks and hosted some stellar Thanksgiving costume contests. In addition, I put on a variety of road races and track events, and now work with the Portland Track Festival.

We love running.  We hope that we are fortunate enough to be able to run for years to come from a home base that provides us access to quiet and tree-lined city streets.

Portland

In June of 2012,  Scott and I packed up the Pod parked in front of our suburban Chicago apartment and made the over 2,000 mile journey west to Portland, Oregon.

This journey was set into motion many months before on a spring break trip to Tucson, Arizona in March of 2011.  We spent this trip running through Sabino Canyon National Forest, swimming, reading, walking and thinking.  At the time, I taught history at an outstanding high school (my alma mater) and Scott had a comfortable corporate job and we lived in Barrington, Illinois - a scenic and affluent suburb where Scott had grown up.  We were happy, but felt restless.

We couldn't shake the feeling our lives were too comfortable and the values of the place we lived in and the places we worked were no longer matching up with who we were and the types of lives we wanted to live and the types of people we wanted to be.  Our values and our dreams were evolving based on a number of life changing experiences and ideas.  In the spring of 2010, Scott and I traveled to Indianapolis to hear the Dalai Lama speak.  We didn't fully realize the impact of his words then, but his message to simplify, to value people and experiences over material goods and to cultivate compassion, would become increasingly central to our own value system.  In the summer of 2011, I had a profound and transformative experience while swimming through the silky waters of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts - I realized that I was a Transcendentalist (150 years after the Transcendentalist movement ended) and I wanted to live my life like Thoreau who said this, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Walden, 90) 

On spring break of 2011, Scott picked up the book, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream by William Powers at a local bookstore in Tucson, Arizona.  Powers made us really question our suburban existence and the pace, quality and comfort of our traffic-filled, competitive and materialistic lives in Barrington.  Thoreau, the Dalai and Powers had powerful calls to action: live deliberately, simplify, find yourself in nature, love others and collect new experiences.  We began to take on these calls to action as personal truths.  After my Walden Pond experience, I started making each history class I taught about three questions: "Who am I? Who are We? and What is good?"  Scott and I also started to seriously ask and answer those questions ourselves.  So, we put pen to paper and wrote out the following lists of what we knew to be true.

Lessons Learned - Spring Break 2011 (unedited)

• Being outdoors and immersed in nature is a key to happiness and mindfulness
• Simplicity makes happiness
• Idleness is a key to creativity
• Losing technology expands your mind
• Taking a risk can lead to something beautiful - a new perspective
• We are very small and a split second in the universe
• Part of living life to its fullest is being scared and uncomfortable
• We are happy and in love
• Touching nature is important
• Playing in the pool is for everyone
• Seeing, hiking and running on trails gives wisdom

Goals and Dreams - Spring Break 2011

• We need to move toward nature, simplicity and creativity
• We want to find inspiration where we live
• Meredith loves being a teacher and wants to be a transformational teacher
• Scott wants to work on transformational projects
• We want to make the good great
• We want to connect with others more
• We want to love more
• We want to be better family members

We decided then that it might take many years, but we would move west to be near the mountains, forests and open spaces that we found so inspiring and life affirming.  Our decision to move west was intentional, but we we didn't seriously consider Portland as a real possibility until a job offer made it possible. We visited Portland in the summer of 2010 and found it to be the city of our dreams - a city with a sense of humor, with more treeline than skyline, where people are progressive and kind, and a place that is walkable, bikeable and runnable.  We also realized that Portland had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and an underfunded, challenging public education system.  We, sadly, stopped pursuing Portland and fixed our attention on other cities out west  - namely, Seattle, Denver and Boise.  In the spring of 2011, Scott and I decided that it might take years, but that we would move to the city where one of us found a job first.  After many rounds of interviews across the country for both of us, the stars aligned and Meredith found the perfect teaching position in the Upper School at Catlin Gabel and Scott found a position at a non-profit a few weeks later. 

We love Portland.  While sometimes terrifying and tragic in ways that most cities can be -we find it to be life-affirming, inspiringly beautiful and without pretense.  We love that we have many varieties of vegan cheese to choose from at the local grocery store, that Scott can commute by bike, that Meredith's students never have to fill in bubbles on tests, that everyone seems to be listening to a song in their own head, that we can run on forested trails and gaze up at a Mountain and learn from authors and artists any day of the week.  We feel fortunate to have arrived at our new home.