House hunting in Colorado: Our first trip!

People weren’t kidding when they told me that Colorado is beautiful and I will love it out there. I have never been there before and we had our first house hunting trip this past weekend. Brian’s been out there a bunch of times for snowboarding trips but I don’t know how to snowboard or ski, which seems unheard of if you live out there!

We flew out of Philly Thursday night after work and our plane was delayed because of weather. There were 25 other planes ahead of ours on the tarmac that needed to take off before us. But somehow we still arrived on time in Denver. I’m surprised they actually planned for that to happen. Usually you’re just shit out of luck.

Anyway, we got to Denver around midnight and I couldn’t see the mountains because of the dark. Boo! We picked up our rental car which was actually a truck but Avis rules. Brian is a preferred member because of all his work trips so we didn’t have to check in or anything. Just had to find the car # and get in and go.

Friday morning we met with our real estate agent for the first time. He’s a pretty cool guy who knows his stuff. He grew up in the area so he knows everything. He picked us up at our hotel and he drove us all around to look at 12 houses that day. It took about 8 hours! I was trying so hard to take good notes on the back of the listing flyers but towards the end of the day I just wrote either yes, no, or smells.

Most of the houses were great. The communities we were looking at were fairly new so the houses were updated for the most part but there’s hardly any yard space, which was a big deal to me but I’m coming to my senses because it’s just not possible to have out there. We also realized, that as freakin awesome as they are, the mountain houses are just too far away from civilization and if we’re going to have a baby, I’d be home bound and alone with no where to walk outside (and possibly fighting off bears) and Brian would be far from work so we gave up the idea of getting a mountain house pretty quick. But they were certainly amazing. The best mountain house was at 10,000 feet and after I climbed the stairs to the house, I was out of breath and felt like my head was being squished and nearly had stars in my peripheral vision. We quickly left and our agent told me to drink lots of water which helped fight off any altitude sickness. None of our family would be able to even visit us if we lived there.

Saturday our agent picked us up again and took us to a few more neighborhoods to see 12 more houses. It took about 6 hours because we weren’t trekking up a mountain. My favorite houses that day were in Castle Rock and Castle Pines. But we didn’t put in any offers because the market is so hot out there that houses are gone after one day. And since we don’t even have a bid on our own house yet, no one would accept our contingent offer when they could have their pick of someone ready to move in right away. So we mainly used this trip to find the neighborhoods we like.

After our tour was done, our agent treated us to the best burger in this little dive bar called Bud’s in Sedalia. It seriously was the best burger I’ve ever had. He’s a cool guy. He said he’d send us a video of a house we liked to help with this whole cross country house buying. It made me feel a little better about how we’re going to make this happen.

That night we met up with a work buddy of Brian’s and got to see their house and adorable kid. It helped me realized that a small yard isn’t so bad if it’s in the right place. We’re hoping to find a house that opens up to a park or an open space preserve to help it not feel so claustrophobic.

Then on Sunday we took the day to have some fun so went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see some dinosaurs. And afterwards we met up with some friends who grew up in our same hometown in NY and grabbed some lunch. There’s more people out in Denver that we know than here in PA so I’m looking forward to hanging out with people again.

The entire weekend was so beautiful at 80 degrees and I am just really excited to be moving to such a beautiful place. There’s so much to do outdoors, the scenery is amazing, and lots of the neighborhoods we’re looking at have these little bike trails and parks nearby that would make having a baby to stroll around really easy and get me out of the house.

So I really love Colorado. We’ll be going back out after we get a bid on our house for more hardcore hunting. Once that happens, game on.