Home At Last

It's a little surprising to see my last post was way back in June. But there was a good reason for that. While I have mentioned the difficulty in finding our perfect place what I did not share at the time was that my husband was very sick.

Our family and close friends knew what was happening but it was all a little overwhelming for me and I felt I didn't need the added pressure of reporting everything on this blog. To make a long story short after months of increasing discomfort it was determined that my husband had a tumor on his pancreas. We conferred with a surgical oncologist in Eugene and surgery was scheduled for early June.

He underwent a difficult surgery called "the Whipple procedure" which was successful and fortunately they found that the tumor was encapsulated. (Just for clarification it was NOT pancreatic cancer.) Unfortunately the recovery for the Whipple is very difficult. He ended up having to have a second surgery about two weeks later to correct a kink in his intestines near where the food tube was connected. That went well but recovery was long and difficult. All in all he was in the hospital for 27 days.

During that time I was staying with my sister in law in who lives just outside of Eugene. The hospital is in Springfield, about 30 minutes away. She graciously allowed me to stay with her during this difficult time and took care of our dogs while I was at the hospital with my husband. The cats were still at the rental in Roseburg and I would drive back to fill their bowls, clean their litter box, and check the mail about every four days.

Finally my husband was released from the hospital with a good prognosis. It was a slow growing tumor which may or may not return. However even if it does he'll probably die of old age before he starts having those same symptoms.

After we got back to Roseburg we resumed our search for our "perfect place". Since we were having a very difficult time finding what we were looking for (I wanted 20+ acres, he had to have a nice house he wouldn't be embarrassed to have friends come visit) I decided I would lower my expectations and we started looking at properties with 15 acres, then 10 acres, and then five acres.

It seemed we always came up against the same old, same old for Douglas County. For our price range either the house was good and the property was not suitable for what I wanted, or the property was great and the house was unliveable. There were nice suitable places that met both our requirements but they were asking too much because everything was being listed as "vineyard potential". It was getting frustrating.

Then just a few weeks after being released from the hospital for the Whipple, my husband suffered an appendicitis attack and had to have yet another operation to remove his perforated appendix! I guess when it rains it pours!

Since things weren't looking too good for us property wise in Douglas County we decided to expand our search to Central Oregon. His mom has a summer home outside of Bend and one set of his grandparents lived in Bend for a while. So my husband was familiar with that area and has always liked that high desert area. Just prior to a visit to his mom I looked on Realtor.com for homes with acreage in that area and found a place in Prineville.

We made an appointment to see the house, which was a bank owned, and we were immediately impressed and felt like "this is it!!!". The house is a great custom built home on 52 acres outside of Prineville. It has been a little neglected and does need some work but it is in terrific shape for a bank owned. When we returned to Roseburg we had the agent we've been working with write up an offer.

After a little back and forth action we got the house. We certainly had a different experience than we expected from hearing about bank owned properties. Everything went very quickly and relatively smoothly. I think from the day we made our offer to the day of closure was less than two months!

This is downtown Prineville from the Ochoco (OH chuh ko) Viewpoint (looking east).

Basically the same view but backed out a bit. The road you see at the bottom is the main road that comes in to town after dropping off a bluff. I'll get better pictures to show this later...

We've owned this house for two weeks now! I find it highly amusing that my last post, about Smith Rock State Park, is a location just 3o minutes from our new home!

I'm looking forward to sharing more about our new house, but that will have to wait until another day. So until then!