7-23-2026 The Video Game Hours That Almost Made Me Wreck the Car (Plus a Flood, a Tile Order, and Price Reduction Season)

My Week: Bridger, my eldest, had elbow surgery this week, and he's home recovering on the couch, which means I've fully leaned into my spoiling-mom era. Junk food whenever he wants it, no questions asked. He earned it. He came out of anesthesia a total hot mess, and I took a video that's staying strictly in the family group chat, the kind we'll all be crying laughing over at Thanksgiving in ten years. The doctor said the surgery went well, and the real silver lining for me: no video games for two weeks. I'll take it.

On the drive down to the surgery center, Bridger casually mentioned that a friend of his has logged 14,000 hours on the same video game since fourth grade. I nearly drove off the road. Another friend has almost 4,000 hours on one game. I was almost afraid to ask what Bridger's number was, and when he said around 1,500 on his favorite game, I felt slightly better but still not great. I mean, think about what else you could build with that many hours. I'll own it, I really don't love video games, and it's a big reason we sent Sterling off to sleep-away camp this week and next.

He gets sucked in hard, and between me and Tag working full time, we need help keeping him busy in the summer. Neither of the boys has a friend group close enough for easy playdates, and this year it felt like everyone's friends were booked solid anyway. So, working parents of the foothills, I'd genuinely love to know: what's your summer childcare trick when camps and screens are the only two options on the table? We spent a good chunk of yesterday together too, just the two of us, and it was one of the nicer days I've had in a while.

This Week in Real Estate: My Real Estate Life

Work was good this week. I closed on a home for a really lovely couple who found me in kind of a roundabout way. The buyer's mom is an agent in Vermont, and she found me through a listing I had, and we just started chatting and got friendly. When her son and his partner ended up with an agent who wasn't the right fit, she pointed them my way. We got the deal done with a lender who locked them in at 6.9% APR with around $8,000 in closing costs on a 30-year conventional loan. That's a genuinely great deal right now. Quick disclaimer since I don't want anyone holding me to it: rates and costs depend entirely on your own credit and financial picture, so your numbers may look different.

Meanwhile, our Florida house decided to have a moment. The living room floor started leaking, which made no sense at first since it sits on a concrete slab nowhere near any plumbing. After a plumber, a leak detector, and an electrician all took a pass at it, we traced it back to the sliding doors leading out to the pool. A big storm had come through, the slope was working against us, there was no silicone barrier doing its job, and water slid right in under flooring that was never meant to get wet. The floor puffed up like a balloon. I managed to figure out the cause, order replacement tile, and lock down a flooring guy for the very next day, all in the same day, which felt like a minor miracle given that half of that part of Florida flooded after Friday's storm too. My mom always said if there's a will there's a way, and I had a serious amount of will, partly because we've got a month-long reservation booked for August; I was not about to give up.

The Market: The Denver and Foothills Market

Market data and analysis for this section comes courtesy of Megan Aller at First American Title.

The biggest story this week: price reduction season has officially arrived across greater Denver and the foothills. Reductions aren't the exception anymore, even on homes that make it under contract. Attached homes, condos, and townhomes have moved firmly into buyer territory, while detached single-family homes are still holding onto a slight seller edge. That gap matters a lot if you're weighing whether to sell a home in Evergreen, Conifer, Golden, or anywhere else in Jefferson County right now.

The Three Strike Rule is still playing out everywhere. Slow showings are strike one. Plenty of showings but no one sticking around is strike two. Sitting well past a typical marketing period without a contract is strike three, and at that point the market has made its opinion known. When a price adjustment is needed, it has to be big enough to put the home in front of a new pool of buyers. Small cuts mostly just make sellers feel better without actually moving the needle.

Lakewood, Applewood, Central Park, Westminster, Arvada, Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree, Parker, South Shore, and Brighton are still moving fast thanks to tight inventory. Sedalia, Aurora, LoDo, Castle Rock, and the Fitzsimmons area are on the slower end, with more inventory, longer days on market, and more frequent price cuts. Anything near the major highway corridors is seeing very little action in the first week. Buyer concessions are common across most of metro Denver now, with LoDo condos as one of the few exceptions since many of those sellers already baked the discount into their price.

If you've got a listing that's been sitting, this is the moment for an honest conversation: price it aggressively enough to compete for today's buyers, or pull it, lease it for a few months, and relaunch next spring with fresh photos and a clean start. Sometimes the smartest move is not fighting the calendar.