Five years ago today, my wife and I closed on our first home in Castle Rock, Colorado. It started as a three bedroom, two and a half bathroom house with a two car garage. Five years later, we have:
- Redone the floors in the main living area
- Added a fence in the backyard so Rusty, our standard poodle, can’t run away anymore
- Added a 13 panel solar array onto the south facing side of the roof
- Finished the basement, including one extra bedroom and one extra full bathroom
- Repainted the outside (it really needed it when we first bought)
- Planted three maple trees, one apple tree, and one blue spruce in the back yard (the apple tree and one of the maples didn’t make it as of this writing)
Of course, there are ups and downs to home ownership. Suburban life can be bland in many ways; I wish my house were more “walkable” to things like restaurants and stores. There is decent biking infrastructure in place in our town, but there is room for vast improvement. When we bought the place, our home heating appliances (forced air furnace and water heater) were original to the house. At the time of writing, I am doing the first replacement of the water heater, and frankly I expect the furnace to need a swap out in the near future.
Still, in many ways, this has been the easiest five years of my life. There was a certain stress to dealing with landlords in the past that is gone. And I get to watch my family grow up here. Here is to the next five, ten, twenty, fifty, no matter where we end up.
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