Column: 20 years of ownership in Bend comes home to roost

As I sit in my backyard shed/home office, I can hear the ripping saws and bonk bonk bonking of nearby hammers. It’s the sound of another new roof going on a neighbor’s house.

It’s been that way for the past year in our little subdivision, built over 2005 and 2006. But the sounds are getting closer to home. This time it’s a house just a couple of doors down.

Even when the sounds are just workers ascending ladders and talking on the rooftops, the sonics are different, and you can just tell it’s not coming from the street or sidewalk.

I always mind noise not of my own making at least a little bit, but with the way Southeast Bend has exploded in growth around us since we moved in 20 years ago this month, noise is par for the course.

Still, the hammering is also the sound of an alarm going off: Time to call a roofer. Time to call a roofer.

Add dealing with a new roof to the list of things about home ownership I was not and continue not to be prepared for, like replacing the so-called guts of all three toilets about 10 years ago. That was fun. Hearing what I was working on, a guy in line at Ace Hardware said, “You’ll be back. You never make just one trip to the hardware store with plumbing.”

He was right. I was in there a couple of more times that day, and I’ll probably be tackling the guts again before too long.

And maybe we should get our windows replaced, too. A neighbor recently told me he’d replaced all the windows in their house because the style all our houses came with has, or had, some kind of gas between panes, which fails after about 20 years. 

Our hot water heater is getting up there in age, too. Heck we’ve already had the automatic garage door repaired about three times. There’s also a lengthy list of things we really want to do, like replace the carpets and redo a bathroom or two. 

Is it just me, or is it easier to procrastinate when you’re in complete denial about the passage of time? As Iggy Popp said, “Jeez it’s been 20 years.” Our kids were 3 and 5 years old when we moved in. Our oldest daughter, Caroline, was in kindergarten. Now she’s 25, and her sisters are 23, all of them working their first post-college graduation jobs. There’s no denying that.

Before we bought this house, our growing family lived in three places over short terms where the owners decided to sell or move in themselves. In 2004, one landlord came over on Nov. 30, our anniversary, and said he wanted us out by the end of the next month.

He had enough heart to extend that deadline a bit when my wife, Catherine, pointed out to him it would mean moving during Christmas. We went ahead and got out as soon as possible. We moved on to another house for one year. In 2005, Catherine found an affordable deal for first time home buyers, meaning we could maybe buy something in Bend. 

Things have changed in 20 years. (David Jasper/The Bulletin)

Did I think it would be our forever home? I think I was just happy to get in something from which no fickle landlord could give us the boot.

Friends back then always made it seem like we lived way down south, almost out of town. Funny, now, considering how Bend has grown at this end in recent years.

When this house was in its finishing stages, and we were between houses, a former colleague of mine put us up in an above-garage apartment at her house in Tumalo. It was a confusing few weeks, the chaos of young kids and all our worldly possessions in a storage container and the five of us in a tiny space. One night, one of our daughters’ loud crying seemed to trigger the howls of coyotes we’d hear in the night out there.

After we moved in in January 2006, I’d sometimes hear them here, too. Back then, there were no roundabouts on Murphy Road, nor did it connect 15th Street on the east side or Brookswood on the west. Murphy was just a secondary road that saw traffic upticks at rush hour or when R.E. Jewell Elementary began or ended for the day. One of the relatively newer stretches was just a field our young daughters played in with neighbors’ kids. Now that field is an artery, and no wise kids would choose to play on it.

Late at night, I’d hear the call-and-response yipping of coyotes, and I’d picture them wandering in from the China Hat area on to one of the nearby golf courses, a sort of bridge between their world and man’s. 

As Bend has grown up all around us, especially out east around 15th and beyond, I went years without hearing any coyotes.

That changed one warm summer night last year, when I cracked my bedroom window and was dumbfounded to hear that haunted yipping sound again.

That sound, I didn’t mind at all. In the morning, there might be alarms going off, but that night, the not-so-distant yipping took me back, or at least took me back to sleep.