Um yeah.  On as much of a whim as real-estate allows for, we bought a condo!

What?  Yes, you heard right.  No, we are not selling our mountain home... just... adding a remote module to it.  

With hubby back state-side but stuck in Virginia, and our house paid off from all that hazard, overtime, and extra per-diem he earned while being over-seas... our plans were laid open.  After changing to a heavier contribution of retirement, do we save and build a garage?  Buy an almost new car, trailer, and travel trailer?  Take wildly amazing vacations?  Or slowly a combination of it all?!?

However, hubby renting in Virginia was more costly than our mortgage had been, so all of these things were put on the back-burner until hubby could be back working in the Denver area.  But working in the area has it's own complications.  In addition to a much smaller paycheck working state-side, hubby was promised the option to work at home part time but the rest of the time at the office in Aurora... about a 2 hour drive when traffic is good, and up to 4 hours in moderate traffic.  Of course this is better than when he worked at the Boulder office (3+ hours at the best of times), but it is still a miserably long commute.

So, with everything else on hold, one day an odd thought popped into my head...... and just wouldn't go away.  Somewhere between an investment, an easier commute for hubby, something for me to fix up and contribute to, and a chance for us to spend some of those lost hours together.  Yeah... purchase a property in town.

I tossed the idea to hubby, but we didn't discuss it much until he was home again.  Only a few weeks after that though, we were investigating ways to make it happen and contacted out great real-estate agent that helped us buy our home up here in the mountains.  On July, Friday the 13th, hubby went to look at a couple condos barely a mile from the Aurora office and we made an offer on one only a few days later, as soon as we got approval from the bank.

And then the terrible waiting game while everything got sorted and the sellers could not be out until the end of August.

(As a strange side-note, Friday the 13th is a special day for my family when it comes to real-estate.  We signed on our home on one, my parents did, too.  So despite my not being at all superstitious, having a Friday the 13th involved in this purchase makes me quite happy.)

Probably the strangest part of it all is the fact that I have not seen the condo in person yet.  Um... yeah.  That is right.  I will be going down to see it for the first time tomorrow.

Why not?  Partly because it just didn't seem that important since it will not be our "home", but mostly because the less involved I was during the purchasing process... the less stress I felt over it all.  I laughingly told hubby that if I don't like it, I will pick the next one.  And humor aside, it may be true.  Our goal will be to rent out half the condo (hopefully to someone from hubby's work), and pay it off as quickly as possible.  And then... depending on how that all goes, we may very well invest in something else property-wise. 

Sadly, a relatively quick pay-off of hopefully under 10 years, means that while we should not have times of hardship, we also won't be rolling in luxury and doing any of the big fun things we might have otherwise been doing.  That giant trip to Egypt?... probably on hold, along with pretty much anything else in the way of vacations, garages, cars, or that fancy induction range that we have been eyeballing for the kitchen for the last 5 or more years.

What does it all boil down to?  Honestly, I can't really say for sure.  Hopefully it is a great investment for our future, but at minimum, it will be a sweet convenience for the present.

And now that we have finalized the paperwork... a lot of projects and some remodeling posts will be coming soon!  And pictures.

However, our website host just closed it's doors after giving us effectively 3 days to move all our websites and databases to a new host... and of course half of the new host won't work with any of our code, so it may be a while before I can get much in the way of pictures onto the server and into posts.