After several false starts I am committed to completing an update to this blog.
Spring, Summer & Fall of 2017
Because my newly purchased property would not close escrow until nearly the end of May my sister, Tami, graciously allowed me to stay with her in Bremerton during the interim. Her place is a beautiful 90-minute drive up highway 3 out of Shelton from my new place on the Steamboat Peninsula.
When I was within a week of closing escrow I stayed at a couple of Air BNB’s in different parts of Olympia as I was excited to explore my new town and the areas surrounding Olympia. One thing I love doing when I’m driving around is to just pick a random street and drive down it to see where it goes. By doing this I’ve found parks, businesses and shortcuts that would’ve been unknown to me.
On May 27, 2017, I met my realtor downtown near Percival Landing who handed me the keys to my new home. I hugged him and thanked him for all of his help. I thought we had become friends, but other than bumping into him three months later at the Blueberry Bash community event out here on Steamboat, I haven’t heard a peep out of him.
Just to give some perspective: 18 months post the sale of my property in Moorpark, I continue to receive periodic (not intrusive) emails, letters, postcards, videos, birthday and holiday greetings from the listing agent I hired there. I guess the agent I used here in Olympia doesn’t believe in marketing.
So the first thing I did at my new place was have it surveyed, marked and recorded with the county as the old-growth forest made it nearly impossible to get through unless you were a raccoon or a squirrel. It took two surveyor guys six hours to hack through the brush with a machete in order to reach the back two corners of the property, which is just shy of 2/3 of an acre. They actually created “tunnels” through the brush so it was possible to walk out there for the first time. It was a Pacific northwest rainforest jungle. After that I hired a guy with an excavator who spent more than a week clearing much of the brush, leaving “islands” of trees with huckleberry and blackberry bushes woven between them. Afterward, there was a mountain of brush piled up in one area, which I had hauled out by another guy.
Olympia DeerHaven 