After viewing the house, we drove the five minutes to the public elementary school. It was a beautiful campus, nestled into a hill, surrounded by trees. Our son played on the playground for a while, and then we wandered around campus, peering into the spacious classrooms. Then we stopped by our in-laws’ house just ten minutes away in a neighboring town, the house where my husband grew up. The thought of being so close to them was tempting.
Back home from hat night, we made our decision. It would be a stretch, we knew, and it would make things difficult for a while. Two years before, I’d published my “breakout book,” one that significantly improved our finances. This house would alter our state of relative financial comfort. But we also knew it was a relatively safe investment, considering the high demand and limited inventory of Silicon Valley. We were one of four potential buyers to bid on the house within 48 hours of the open house. We were given the option to counter, and we did. A couple of days later, we got the call: the house was ours.
We were elated and terrified. We instantly put our city house on the market and sold it within two weeks–unfortunately for less than we paid for it. But we were taking advantage of a relative lull in the market, and we felt that the loss would be made up for by the appreciation of the canyon house.
Still, the downpayment was a major stretch. So we moved in with our old furniture, which wasn’t quite adequate for the space. Our single furniture purchase was a king-sized bed for the master bedroom. That first night, sleeping in the bed, I was comfortable (I’d never had a king-sized bed before) and filled with anxiety. We could make the payments, but everything else was going to be difficult. My writing income has always been up and down, and now, we’d put ourselves in a position where we needed my writing income to keep coming in steadily, and there was no guarantee that would happen. I immediately started lining up teaching gigs to supplement my advances and royalties.
Days after we moved in, I taught a day-long writing workshop in our cobbled together living room, and was interrupted halfway through by a neighbor across the canyon who said our pool filter was making too much noise. We had someone come to look at the filter later that week, which was when we discovered that pool equals money pit. Which, of course, any intelligent person should already know. But hey, live and learn.
Next: Seven Years and Counting