I never really liked our house in Boise.

We bought it in the fall of 2006 at the peak of the pre-recession housing bubble. In hindsight we should have waited six months, but we were young and impulsive, and once our friends had all bought homes and our landlord raised our rent, we reached a breaking point. Before we wrote another rent check, we quickly prequalified, toured a few houses in our price range and purchased what we thought was the best of the lot, a 40-year-old short-sale ranch on Boise’s West Bench.

We loved the neighborhood and location – surrounded by parks, 10 minutes to downtown by car and 20 by bike, neighbors we already knew – and 1,452 square feet on 0.2 acres seemed sufficient for a newly-married couple with no kids. We were grateful to even be in this position. Moving to Boise from a struggling mill town in northern New Hampshire had improved our financial situation, but it came with a sharp rise in our cost of living, particularly when it came to rent and housing prices. In New Hampshire, we were able to buy our first home for $75,000 on modest income with no down payment; when we arrived in Boise, a starter home was going for double that and prices were ticking up daily. With the credit card and student loan debt we had carried with us to Idaho and a lack of savings for a down payment (again), it felt like a minor miracle to have prequalified at all – and for a fixed-rate 30-year loan nearly three times the purchase price of our home in New Hampshire.

We moved in on a sunny and warm October day, one of those picturesque high-desert autumn days that Boiseans cherish. It was exciting to be homeowners again. Erica painted a few of the interior rooms. I dug out a fire pit in the backyard. Together we chipped away at the landscaping. Everything was fine at first, but it didn’t take long to start feeling the effects of our impulsiveness. The minor details we had overlooked in our haste – the plumbing leaks, the tiny kitchen, the lack of storage – quickly evolved into major annoyances. The home inspector left us with a long list of repairs and upgrades that needed to be addressed when time and money allowed, but both were in short supply.

We thought we were playing it safe by buying a home in the middle of our price range, but it proved to be a financial struggle from the start. After making our first mortgage payment on the first of the month, by month two we were already delaying payment until the 16th – the final day before the late fee kicked in – and we never found our way back to the first. But we were making it work, and anyway, it wasn’t going to be forever. This was our starter home, we told ourselves, a foot in the Boise real estate door that, given the natural trajectory of salaries and home values, we could leverage for a larger house with more land in a few years.

Then the bottom fell out of the American Dream.

Not unlike 2020, 2007 started out with excitement and promise. We had just celebrated the first Christmas in our new home, our job satisfaction was at an all-time high, and in February Prince orchestrated the best Super Bowl halftime performance in the history of the game as the purple rain poured down on Miami.

But soon enough, the unease set in. Not unlike COVID-19, talk of a recession in the early days of 2007 rapidly progressed from passive water-cooler chatter to troubling murmurs to oh-shit-did-you-hear-what’s-happening? Working in a newsroom helped attune me to the severity of the looming economic storm, but it still didn’t hit home until corporate put us on hiring and wage freezes that spring. A few months later, hours were cut for all non-salaried employees. Two rounds of layoffs followed in 2008. My number came up in the third round, and in the spring of 2009, I found myself jobless.

In the middle of all this, in July 2008, we welcomed our first and only child into the world. Magnolia’s birth was a pleasant distraction from the havoc of the Great Recession, but shit would get real for us real fast in 2009. Three months after my layoff and a few weeks after Magnolia’s first birthday, Erica’s job was cut, too. Meanwhile, our house just kept losing value. In 2009, the initial drop was about $17,000. In 2010, down another $29,000. Year after year, the annual assessment notice delivered more grim news, and when the dust finally settled and the economy began its slow healing process, our house had lost nearly $78,000 in value – $3,000 more than the purchase price of our first home in New Hampshire. Our mortgage was deep underwater and it felt like we were in deep shit.

I wanted to run away. To what or where I didn’t know, but anywhere but our shrinking house that we couldn’t sell without taking a huge financial hit. We had no choice but to sit and wait it out. I felt like a sucker. Like we’d been swindled. We were trapped in our house, and I was mad at myself for taking the bait in the first place and walking right in with an idiot’s grin on my face.

It took us a while to find our way out. With our careers at crossroads in 2009, Erica and I made a pivot to self-employment and joined forces to put our creativity to work – writing, editing, marketing, photography, graphic design, anything non-sexual we were good at doing that people would pay us to do. It was a long, slow crawl out of the muck, and we lost our footing several times along the way, but by 2020 we had hustled and grunted our way through the gig economy, part-time jobs and various professional fits and starts to find ourselves in leadership positions with companies we loved and fulfilling roles in the Boise creative community.

The house, unfortunately, bore the brunt of this decade-long struggle. That long list of repairs and upgrades remained more or less untouched, and inside and out, our home was showing signs of age and neglect. And it was crowded. There were only three of us in the house (five if you count the cat and the dog), but anyone who has raised a kid can tell you the early childhood years are full of stuff – a steady, rotating, never-ending plush and polymer stream – and it takes up a hell of a lot of room. Also, I collect records. We crammed more storage into a one-car garage that was already too full for a car, we switched rooms around to make our footprint function better (we tried, at least), but we simply had too much stuff for our space, and even with regular purges and a reasonably minimalist lifestyle, we never could make enough room for ourselves. Our house felt perpetually cluttered, and by default, so did our lives.

On a positive note, we were able to refinance our loan for free through an economic recovery program and cut our monthly by a few hundred dollars. Which helped, but not enough to keep us from falling behind on our mortgage for about 18 months during the low point of our big dig-out. Was the struggle worth it? Did I enjoy all the time and energy we put into keeping this roof over our head? Most days, the answer was no. In private moments, far removed from my public face and usually at 3 in the morning while my family slept, I was anxious and overwhelmed and suffocating under the weight of it all. I started having these visions of myself as a bent and broken old man, stuck in Idaho in the same decrepit house, estranged from everyone and everything I loved, withering away to nothing as the walls crumbled around me.

Mercifully, the fog lifted eventually. Boise may have trailed the national rebound, but when our time came, the city roared to life again, and the real estate market – buoyed by West Coast transplants and speculators scooping up foreclosed properties – played a big part in the comeback. In 2013, our assessment notice brought news of the first increase in five years, and for the next half-decade it just kept going up. By 2018, our home’s value had increased nearly $80,000, eclipsing our 2006 buying price for the first time ever. In 2019, it shot up another $38,000; in 2020, another $10,000. Suddenly, for the first time in our adult lives, we had an investment chip to cash in if we played our cards right.

Exactly how big that chip was we did not know, but what we did know was encouraging. As a former real estate agent who kept tabs on the market, Erica had been tracking the rising sale prices in our neighborhood for a couple of years. At first I politely acknowledged her reports before diving my beak back into my shredded wheat, but then the numbers got interesting. And more interesting. By the time we contacted our agent in January 2020, the median home value in our county was up to $363,000 – roughly double what we paid for our house in 2006. It came as no surprise to anyone who read their assessment notice that Boise ended 2019 No. 1 in the country for price increase.

Our realtor Andrea came over on Feb. 27, a gray, unseasonably warm late-winter Thursday.  Andrea was the first person to learn of our plans to move to Ohio in the spring of 2021, and her visit was an exploratory step but a big one, even in the context of a 15-month relocation plan. It signaled to ourselves – more than any other past flirtation with our mythical move back East – the seriousness of our intentions, even if by late-February 2020 any life planning, long-term or otherwise, had been put on pause until we knew if, or how, the coronavirus would impact our lives in the short-term.

Nonetheless, we kept the appointment. We walked the house with Andrea, then briefly surveyed the backyard. We asked her what we needed to do to get the property ready to sell, what effect the pandemic might have on the real estate market and, last but not least, what we could expect price-wise. None of us wore masks, which weren’t yet a thing, but we all kept our distance as the CDC and others had recommended we do. It was a quick visit anyway. Andrea had sold us the house in 2006 and she knew the market like the back of her hand, so it didn’t take long for her to throw us a number – a jaw-dropping figure that erased every moment of anguish from the past decade of our life in a house I never really liked … but suddenly liked very much.

The next question was, where do we go from here, and when? But before we could answer, COVID-19 kept us from going anywhere.

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