A truck instead of a house – for now

What? Yep, John and I don’t buy cars very often. We have an 11-year-old Mini Cooper and a 16-year-old Jeep and that’s how it’s been for a long while. Houses on the other hand…

It seems fairly inevitable that we’re eventually going to buy another house. The one I’m living in is only 950 sqft and doesn’t meet John’s desires for a rural area and decent garage/shop space. The one John’s living in doesn’t meet my wishlist for being down out of the wind, and somewhat near a decent grocery store.

But we’ve hit some snags. First of all, both my son and my parents are going to be purchasing houses soon, and I’m on point for providing consulting time and some financial contributions. So I’m now monitoring both the Boise and the Ann Arbor housing markets as well as the entire state of New Mexico. (And sometimes California because someday Laura and I…ok never mind that for now.)

In addition to having a somewhat different set of criteria, John and I also don’t have a clear understanding of where to buy a house. The prices in the neighborhood right near my job look like this:

That’s everything on the market right now in that area – no filters on that search. In case you’re wondering, yep, 2.9M does indeed mean $2,900,000. And the 9.95M? How could anything be worth nearly ten million dollars in New Mexico? I wonder what famous person owns it. looks like this:

The cheapest one in the entire neighborhood, at $525,000, looks like this. Uh-hu. Does that look like it’s worth over half-million to you?

And that doesn’t even account for John’s desire for rural living. If we head a few miles east into the foothills, the prices look like this:

This one for 4.9 million is really pretty:

So back to reality…we bought a used truck! Last month was my birthday, so I asked John for a crappy old truck for my birthday – because we have rentals and are constantly needing to move things. Washer & dryer from one rental to a different rental. Dishwasher from Santa Fe to one of the rentals. Furniture, from Placitas to Santa Fe. Drywall, bricks, tile, shelving; from Home Depot to all the houses. Junk to the dump!

John said he had planned to buy me an Apple watch. My friend got an Apple watch for her birthday and likes it. But I need to haul junk to the dump. It wasn’t hard to convince him. And he didn’t buy a crappy truck either. It’s a great truck! Thank you, John!

The stats are: 2008 Nissan Frontier, 120,000 miles. Runs great, looks great!

It looks black in a couple of the pictures, but it’s actually a very nice dark blue.

It has an extended cab with doors that open like French doors, and little fold-up seats in the back. (In case of an emergency, like a hitchhiking leprechaun.)

We’ve only had it a couple of days and we’ve already taken a big load of crap to the dump, as well as bought drywall for my garage. Drywall comes in huge sheets that barely fit into a pickup and definitely don’t fit in a Jeep.

A guy named Sal put up the drywall for me today. Sal’s a lot faster than Sam the brick guy.

I wanted drywall before I put up shelving, and I want shelving so I can move more stuff from the house in Placitas to the house Santa fe.

In the end it always has to do with houses, lol.