So Saturday at noon I booked a flight for Natalie and I to Denver, for our 5th trip to Colorado for house shopping. There were two homes that popped up last week, at the end of the week, that we thought looked great as prospects for us. We considered putting in offers without even going out and seeing them, but just couldn’t quite pull that trigger. After skating 12 miles Saturday morning, well to be honest I skated 11 and walked the last mile due to hardware issues with my skates, I came home and talked to our agent, and then started looking at flight options. I tried and tried to make Priceline work for us, but the best deal we could get on priceline was $350/person, way more than we wanted to spend. After a few hours of effort I finally came across a last minute deal on Travelocity with airfare and two nights hotel in the Denver Tech Center for $280/person, I booked it and less than four hours later we were on our way.

Seems like each trip is turning out the same way. We find a few houses, mostly short sales, that we like. We make an offer. Rinse, repeat.

Natalie and I got back from Colorado again this evening. I’ll post a longer update from the trip later, but here’s some pictures of the latest house we’ve offered on. We actually upped our offer A LOT, right before we left this afternoon.

This house appears to be made for us. The upper level is nearly 100% tile floors, which will be great for the dogs. The backyard has hardly any grass in it, and what we saw was being chewed on by one of four dogs, so that will need to be planted/sod. The interesting thing about the backyard is that it is 60% (rough guess) paved, that’s right, paved. There’s concrete all the way around the sides, and somewhat down the middle. You might ask why. Well we figure it’s because of the dogs. Our dogs at the last place we rented ran a track around the yard at the fence, I figure that they paved to account for this.

The inside upstairs is great, only a few things (trim to pain) left to do. The downstairs is another story. It was finished at one point, but our guess is the dogs made a MESS of the carpet, so it was all cut up. The basement doesn’t smell good, but hopefully we can get that corrected if we end up buying the house. It’s a short sale, so who knows if we will ever hear anything on it.

The Front

The Deck

The View

The Kitchen

The Backyard (some of it)

We’re off to Parker again Thursday through Saturday to take what I think is our 5th house hunting trip? Maybe it’s only trip four, either way, we’ve seen a lot! Hopefully this will be the winning trip.