Since 2008 I have lived in Portland, Oregon in the USA after moving from my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, and overall I’ve enjoyed it. I got to live in the heart of the city, in it’s surroundings, and in many of the quadrants (NE/SE/SW/NW). In all that time life definitely played out, got married, changed jobs, etc, etc. We talked for a while about this, and ultimately asked the question - As Portland is starting to grow up, do we want to lean in to city life, or lean into more rural life, and stop being stuck in-between. Trying to have garage space for projects, yards for gardens in a city is just too rich for us, and we asked ourselves what we wanted our ’normal’ to be.
My partner and I would always enjoy camping, and being out amongst the woods, so we decided, lets just live there! We spent a long time looking, and visited a lot of properties, but found a listing in Sandy we really liked. The sellers were a mess to deal with, having moved out of state, and the sellers realtor multiple times said he had ’lost control of the sellers, and didn’t know what was going on.’ We liked the property though a great deal, so we set to free the property from the prior owners, we tried to buy it twice during a summer. A truly wild ride! Multiple lawsuits later, and some contract hell, we finally closed on the home and sold our Portland home! - It took almost 9 months all said and done, but it was worth it!
We formally closed on the new place August 5th, 2020. It felt good to move in to a 20 acre plot, with a sloped, wooded forest, and a 3 bedroom home large enough for a guestroom, and home offices since we work from home. It’s taken a lot of work to get to this point, and it wasn’t easy. We feel very lucky to be here, and I think that makes feel all the better as an accomplishment. While we still love to travel, being able to call this home has been a dream come true in a lot of ways. Being in the city did have it’s perks, and we enjoy being a very short drive into the city when we want to go to a restaurant or enjoy city life. We also think it’ll be easy to experience various city spaces when we travel, but a little harder to find our little slice of nature. We have every intention to life with nature, and try to be good stewards to the forest we have now. We’ll try to keep our impact mindful, and try to nurture the space with natural designs in mind.
The SwanSpoons have a place to be, and we are slowly getting to know the home, the land, and all the forest friends we get to share the space with. In any case, this is kind of a weird one to write about, it’s just where we live now, but it’s also a big life change, so I didn’t want to leave it out. It’ll be our platform we try to use to build our life around.
Well, lots more I could say, but mostly just marking this chapter! Take care!
