“It seriously was fun for the first two months, it was exciting. We saw so many different things that we liked and didn’t like and figured out the things we were willing to compromise on. Then it started to feel like we were in a parade. Every time we went to go see a house it was like the Parade of Homes and everyone and their grandma was there. We’d see the same couples at every house for a weekend. Sometimes we’d even see them for the next couple weekends.  Then we’d start seeing them less and less and then we’d get so pissed thinking they already snatched a place and we were still out looking. We’re thinking, ‘we’re still here, Tee and Koni still at it again!’ It was pretty bad. We saw 70 houses and wrote 19 contracts before we got our house.

We knew it was gonna be a pivotal part of our relationship, that’s why we wanted to buy a house.  We were ready and it felt like the next stage in the evolution of our relationship. She’d been waiting for me to give us the go ahead and I thought, ‘we’re in a good spot, let’s do this’ but little did we know, so was the whole world.

It seemed like everyone wanted to move here because of the pot industry. So many people were putting in bids over list price and even blind bids from people out of state. I thought, ‘why are they doing this to us, how are you gonna buy a house from California without even seeing it? Stop taking houses from us!’ It was that hard, us local kids that grew up here and knew we wanted to live here couldn’t even get houses. I felt bad for everyone buying houses two years ago because it was that daunting.

I’m not ever buying a house again. I refuse to go through that again. Like I tell everybody, it was one of the hardest things psychologically I’ve gone through. I don’t want to go through that again but we did get the house of our dreams. When I win the lottery, we’re not selling our house.  We’ll buy another one but we’re never selling this house because it’s ours.  It was a blessing how it all worked out.  All the feelings and anxiety, tears and laughter – it was so meant to be.”