It has been my dream for 13 years to own property in Garden Valley... ever since my first visit to Robin's cabin. I almost bought some land back in 2006 when some 1/3 acre lots were for sale by Robin, but I really wanted a lot on the river like Robin's, so I held out :-) Since we've been married, Matt has shared in my dream, and has spent the last 5 years checking properties on Zillow. There have been several times when Matt has suggested we drive to go look at some of the properties he's found, but we never went because it wasn't a real possibility at the time.
In April, Matt and I went to the Parade of Homes, and my friend Sally (who is a realtor) was talking to us about the housing market... Well, that conversation caused us to think about selling our rental. I went home that evening, crunched some numbers, and saw that it would make significant financial sense for us to sell our rental and put that money toward our current mortgage. It took a little longer than we had hoped to sell the house (due to the fact that we had just extended a year lease with the current renters so we had to sell to an investor), but we finally accepted an offer toward the end of June.
The last week of June, while Matt was at Trek, I had a crazy idea. What if we saved back some of the money from the sale of our rental and bought some land?! I found a property on Zillow that looked promising and sent the link to Matt, saying I thought we should go check it out. Matt called me as soon as he saw my text and was on board! The funny thing is that he had already "favorited" that exact property on Zillow (it had been on the market for about a year!). Shortly after Matt got home from Trek, we seriously started looking for properties. There were a few that looked like good possibilities, but I was really set on Garden Valley. I remember Robin telling me how they could get their kids off to school, head up the one hour to Garden Valley to work on their cabin all day, and then be home before their kids got home from school. That short drive was the biggest selling point for me, but Garden Valley also has so many other bonuses... Starlight Mountain Theater, an awesome tubing hill, a gun range, a river for floating or rafting, great hiking trails, and more.
We drove up and looked at a couple different properties. There was a gorgeous one-acre lot right next to Robin's property, and I was almost sold on it, but it didn't have direct water access. Matt really wanted water on whichever property we bought (and honestly, I did too), so we kept going back to that original property I texted him about. It was a three acre lot that backed up to BLM land and had a creek running right through the middle of it. The creek is what really sold us. We envisioned so many family memories being made there, and we decided to pull the trigger and take the first step toward making our dream a reality. We closed on the land the first of August and have been giddy about it ever since. It is our new "happy place". Every time we go up there (which was at least twice a week the entire month of August), we just can't believe that little piece of heaven is ours. Stay tuned for way too many future posts about our new home away from home (even though it's just bare land right now!).
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