We had been living in our Connecticut house for thirty years when we decided to move to Washington to be close to the grandkids. A real estate agent gave us advice on how to make the house look as good as possible: “Get a big dumpster and get rid of stuff”, she said.

Stuff certainly had accumulated in thirty years, but getting a dumpster and filling it just didn’t seem right. Instead, we took many trips to Goodwill and some to the dump. We sold stuff in tagsales and on Craigslist, gave things to friends, put up “Free Stuff” signs and put things in the front yard, and called The Salvation Army to pick up some furniture.

With a little paint and some light carpentry, the place seemed ready – until we had the septic tank inspected. We had it replaced. Then the house was really ready. The realtor hired a photographer, and it looked great on Zillow. It sold pretty quickly, and we headed for our new home state.

We arranged to stay in an Airbnb apartment in Bellevue as a home base for our house hunting. Despite some early research, we were shocked at the difference in home prices. According to Redfin, the average selling price today in Bellevue is $1,450,000. In Issaquah, where the grandkids are, it is $1,000,000.

Enumclaw comes in at a more reasonable $675,000. But the town we had moved from today has an average home price of $240,000. The selling price of our old house was only going to be a downpayment on a house here.

We spent hours looking at houses on Zillow, and drove for a quick look at a few. There was a nearly affordable one in Issaquah, but it looked like it was being reclaimed by nature. I could smell the mildew from outside. We didn’t go in.

There was one on Whidbey Island that seemed nice until we learned that Navy fighter jets practiced take off and landing nearby.

We continued to look at Zillow. Obsessively, you might have said. Some of the people who show their homes for sale on real estate sites must not get any professional advice. Sometimes it was funny, but tinged with a little sympathy, too. I mean, at least pick up the laundry from the floor, make the beds and take the dirty dishes off the counters!

Almost all of the houses we looked at had smaller yards than you would see in our old hometown. I liked the prospect of spending less time mowing the lawn and raking leaves, but it did seem a little crowded. I mentioned to a Washington resident that it seemed ironic that, with all the open land found here, the new houses were all built so close together. “Maybe that’s why we have so much open space,” she said. Good point.

I noticed some regional differences in building practices. For example, unlike Washington, New England houses almost always have basements (it gets so cold in Connecticut that pipes need to be below the frost line to keep from freezing and cracking). That was where I would look first if I was considering buying the house; you can literally see the foundation and the plumbing, heating and electrical systems. It also gives you a place to keep all that stuff that Washington residents keep in their garages.

New England houses have wood siding or are built of brick. I never saw the cement and fiber siding that is so widely used in the Northwest. It would really work well in the Northeast. The textured interior walls that are so common here were almost never seen in Connecticut. It effectively hides a lot of minor imperfections.

We expanded our search. Ellensburg seemed more affordable, and it had a lot to offer. We looked at a few houses with a mix of hope and worry. The hopes faded when we considered that Ellensburg would be cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The hopes disappeared when we considered the reality of having to drive up and over Snoqualmie Pass to see the grandkids.

Maybe renting was the answer, we thought. We quickly learned that rents in Issaquah were ridiculously high. When we looked Maple Valley, I was in the office of an apartment complex, waiting for a tour. A resident came in to report that his car had been broken into. “Oh, sorry. We’ve been having a few of those,” he was told. I cut my visit short.

Back on Zillow, we looked in Covington. It was promising, but one of the two houses that seemed promising was tiny, and the other was going to take a lot of repair work.

We toured a condo in Kent. It wasn’t quite right, but we met an agent we liked. He recommended some other places in Kent and Auburn. They were not horrible, but we hoped for something less “urban”.

I asked the agent about Enumclaw, and he told us that there was nothing for sale there.

Eventually, we got a new agent, and raised our price range, too. Once I decided to break those rules, it became easier to break others — I had said that I wasn’t interested in buying a brand new house that was part of a development built on a former farm. But that was where we looked, and for the first time, it seemed we were getting close to the end of the search.

Still, it was hard to say yes to buying a house so far over our planned budget. It seemed prudent to see what else was for sale in our new price range. We saw a big house in Black Diamond, with a wildly overgrown yard and a sagging roof. We saw a really nice house in Puyallup, with a highway right behind it. And then a big house in Kent that must have been owned by someone with serious attention deficit disorder: it had numerous incomplete projects. We saw a nearly finished house in Tacoma that seemed interesting until a neighbor came over and warned us about the unscrupulous builder.

And so, it was back to Enumclaw, feeling pretty close to certain. With another tour of the house, and a dinner in an Italian restaurant that would fit in on the famous Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, we were sold: Enumclaw was IT.

And now, nearly three years later, we continue to find more reasons to love this place. Don’t take it for granted — this is a great place to live!