Portlanded!

Portland Public Schools are back in session.  Fortunately my kids got the teachers they wanted and they are off and running.  Now it’s my turn to get through the mountain of papers and get a system down for the year.  To ease in, l’ll start with when I can plan a vacation based on the PPS calendar.

We were a cold lunch family last year and this year this year my first grader has decided he’s a hot lunch kid (annual menu).  PPS participates in an online payment system so you can load up those lunch accounts.  I registered then discovered that there is a $1.95 fee every time I add money via the system.  I’m still glad I registered just to see the account balance but I’m going to drop off my cash with the lunch lady instead.

At the start of school each school sends home a Family and Student handbook.  If you want to read about the acceptable skirt length or that they will not be telling you when lice are rampant in your classroom that’s the place to do it.

If you are new to PPS you will need a background check on file before you can volunteer.

Happy back to school!

After going through some serious ups and downs with Chicago Public Schools and being a believer in participating in the public system, schools were a huge factor in our move.

 

We started looking in Lake Oswego because the schools are exceptionally good.

 

Alas, it was just too suburban for these city kiddies. So I needed to find a quality school in the city of Portland. We had navigated schools in Chicago so I had a bit of experience with school spreadsheets.   I used scores from the following sources to start to get a picture of where the “good” schools were: Great Schools, Oregon Live, US News and World Report

 

What I had really learned though was that all data aside schools just have a feeling about them and sometimes the ones on the way up have more energy than the ones who have made it to the top. One of the schools that my children attended in Chicago had a principal who made himself very accessible to the parents and staff. He was an exceptional communicator and I saw the difference that made within the school community.

 

Sadly, Principals need to be politians and I was looking for one I could believe in. Whether through luck or research we ended up in a happy place. When I asked my daughter what the best part of the move was she said “my school.” Full disclosure the day is almost an hour shorter here and there is an additional recess but I’m going to put one up in the win column.

Searching for a house in the “right” neighborhood in a city you don’t know can be daunting.   Schools were a huge factor for us but I’ll get into the schools in a future post. Commute time was an area we had identified to improve our quality of life so I didn’t want to be anywhere farther than a 20 minute commute. Fortunately, I learned that 20 minutes is the quoted commute time for pretty much anything in Portland.

So, we drove the 4 quadrants of Portland in search of what neighborhood and home felt like a good fit.

Once the cat was out of the bag about the move, it turned out many of my friends had friends who lived in Portland. So, I asked to be put in touch with anyone who was either still here or had lived here in the last few years.   Urban neighborhoods change fast and I needed current intel. I also discovered I had two former co-workers living here and both have children-thank you Linked In!

This has become one of my favorite maps and has some good neighborhood data.

I also used the descriptions in Newcomers Handbook for Portland to help me get a feel for neighborhoods ahead of getting here to drive them and look at houses.

When it came to looking at houses here is what surprised this Midwestern girl:

•  They count the basement square footage. I’m not talking finished, walk out basement. We looked at multiple houses with unfinished basements, no egress windows that had included the square footage in their listing. This made the rest of the house much smaller than I expected.
•  Many houses don’t have a basement at all.
•  Many houses do not have a garage
•  It is not uncommon for Portlanders to use their garage for the kayak, paddle board, bikes, etc. Garages are not necessarily a car thing.
•  The shared driveway-in some of the SE/NE neighborhoods there is one driveway that leads to both your garage and your next-door neighbor’s.
•  Some of the “backyards,” especially on the SW side, were the side of a mountain. This provides beautiful dinner party views of the city. It also scared the hell out of this mother of young children.

 I came to Chicago post-college seeking everything a big city has to offer and man did it deliver.

Fast forward 10 years a husband and 2 kids and I found myself in a life where we were doing more keeping up than living. My husband and I knew that the pace we were moving was not ideal but we were happy, had great friends and loved our urban life.

We often talked about what we would retrofit in order to make life more manageable. Then we started talking about what we would look for if we made a bigger change. What if we blew it all up and started over. What would we look for in a place, in jobs, in life.   What life would we build if we started with a blank slate?

What started as casual pillow talk turned into a list that would help us evaluate opportunities.

Equal or lower cost of living

Quality schools

Urban environment or at least a walkable downtown

Shorter commutes

Warmer weather

Charming houses

Just as casually as our list started a conversation started with a company in Portland, OR. Neither of us had ever been to Portland at the time. In the end we blew it all up. We’ve Portlanded and now we are putting the pieces of life back in place in one of the quirkiest cities in America.