Sitka Housing

Before we moved here we did a plethora of investigation about everything we could. The bishop of our church ward here was great for info as was the other optometrist I work with.
One thing we discovered was that housing was quite a bit more than Logan. Thankfully, not as bad as California. When we came for our site visit(that's for another posting) we found a rental house for which we signed a 1 year lease. Rentals here are hard to get and go fast when they are available. We had planned on taking a year or so to find a house. Then we found a house that we had seen in October on the internet. In March we got into the house and eventhough our landlord was quite put out and wouldn't let us out of the lease until he rented it again...fortunately it was rented before our deposit ran out so we could move into the house unhinderd.
Our house has a great view of an inlet off of Jamestown Bay which is about 3 miles south of downtown Sitka. We do have this thing for yellow houses. Our first house was light yellow as was the second and of course we have used yellow inside for years. This yellow house has 3 floors and .3 acres and 2700 sq ft. We feel very lucky to have this as most lots here are hill sides and small and the houses are smaller. Of course we don't have a population here that has bunches of kids like in Utah. We did get 4 BR though. Our lot is flat with just a bit of lawn...enough to keep me happy. The land scaping is nice and we have had a nice bunch of flowering perennials. We really didn't know what to expect or what to get rid of. Now we have a good idea.
The 2 car garage is nice since we only have one car...my Toyota Echo. Really good around here with lots of stop and go driving and gas like many of you at $3.50/gal. We didn't bring Lori's mini-van because Richard wrecked it just before we left and so we had a friend(thanks Steve) sell it for us. We did keep the Honda scooter we got last summer and I ride that to work every day... 80+ mpg... pretty nice. And since there are now speed limits over 45 here I rarely have to hold up traffic. Charles and Meg are riding their bikes a lot into town. We have a nice walk/bike path all along the road that leads to our house. Well, I've been pretty long winded, so I'll find a different subject later. Ciao