Real Estate

Closing Day

/ bperica / 2 Comments

How do you sum up a year? I have in the past, written blog posts under the title “The Year in Review,” or something along those lines. I started writing such a thing a couple days ago and I finished today, but it’s too long. I post the whole review and not many people are going to make it to the end. I’ll boil that down to the bones and post that later. But for now, I’ll leave you with my thoughts on May 2025. It was a big year for my family and May was the hardest, busiest, and most emotional month in a year of busy and emotional months.

May 2025 In Review

We sold our house on 5th Avenue this month. The buyers, inexplicably, wanted us to take apart a floating deck we built in between our house and our neighbor’s house to the west. My parents and Kate’s dad were there to help dismantle the deck. We enjoyed our small, but perfect backyard on that wonderful spring evening. We found a home to live in for a few weeks until the kids finish school. It’s in the same neighborhood, within walking distance of our beloved 5th Ave house.

The PODS arrived May 13th, 3 of them. They’re filled on the 14th, to the ceiling. The next day they are taken away and the house is cleaned for eleven hours, luckily, not by me. I take videos of the empty house and record voice memos of what I remember from every room, hallway, closet, and door, crying or fighting back tears in each one.

My last moment in the house is the morning we close. The kids are at school. Kate is at work. I touch the walls in the living room. I pat them. I run my hands across their textured surface. I hug them. I say goodbye to the house like an old friend, a friend of eleven years, eleven of the toughest, eleven of the best. I laugh at myself as I speak to the house and whisper into its walls, telling it to be as nice to the next family as it was to ours, telling it to be a good friend to them.

From the front door, I take one last look about ten times. The house is open concept and has a relatively small first floor so with a glance I see the dining room, kitchen, and living room. I could have stood there for the rest of the day cycling through memories from every corner of those rooms, but it was time to close that door one last time.

At the bottom of the stairs, standing on the sidewalk, I felt so lonely, like I had truly lost a friend. I called Kate and let all the emotions out. I had a mix of feelings: gratitude for this structure I just stepped out of for the last time, a sense of mourning our Denver lives, and a greater sense of fear, not knowing where we would live next, and second-guessing our decision to move at all.

But the day did not allow for much contemplation. I had to unpack and continue our sort of move-in at the temporary house. I had elementary field days to attend. I had a half marathon to run in Steamboat Springs. (Note to self: never train for a race and move at the same time ever again.)

I am grateful for the busyness of the days following our 5th Ave close. They did not allow for me to further mourn or worry about what was next. We just had to continue life as usual in Denver, just with a different place to come back to at the end of those hectic days.

Moving On

/ bperica / 2 Comments

As soon as I carefully took the kids artwork down, picking at the bits of scotch tape holding self-portraits to doors, and taking care not to rip the large piece of paper my son drew a pipe system on, the house felt different. Moving changed from this half-serious idea that has held space in our heads for two years to this real, tactile change involving paper cuts from handling cardboard boxes and sore backs from lifting just a little too much. 

Official-looking family portraits have come down, replaced by blank walls or a photo of a nondescript hillside most passers by would not recognize as Scotland. Old carpet has been torn up and tossed out and now the house smells like Carpet Exchange. The amount of furniture in the house has been trimmed down, making some rooms feel nice, but not lived in. 

Load by load to the storage unit—the first I have ever rented—the home becomes a house, the house becomes a structure. Yet, still there are memories being made, even today, that will forever be associated with this house, which I have called home for ten years, the longest I have lived in one place.

Open house after open house I begin to appreciate our house a little more. The painted walls, the shiplap entryway, the exposed I-beam in the basement so I could attach a pull-up bar, and the immaculate basement bathroom. All projects that we completed ourselves or hovered nearby acting like an overbearing super on a construction site while others did the work. 

The furniture we are keeping in the house has been moved, cleaned, and flipped around like Lego pieces, indeed, revealing long-lost Lego pieces, a vintage Fisher Price puzzle piece that has been missing since my son was four-years-old, and more of those Checkers pieces that I thought we had successfully rounded up. 

The last evidence of our family in the house are some of the most treasured items. No stager will get me to take them down and no storage unit is secure enough for them. It’s my daughter’s framed one-month handprint that is barely bigger than my thumb, resting on my desk. A polaroid of Kate and I taken by an old friend. Two pictures of the family on the beach in Mexico. A kid’s first hand-drawn family portrait. And a large picture of my namesake, Bryce Neff, pictured with his bombing group in the Korean War. All these items and more will find a new structure that will become a house that will, with time, become a home, and God-willing, lives lived in that home will produce an equally wide swath of life as we have seen on 5th Ave.

God-willing.