Finding Paradise

If you live in the Bay Area, or know someone who has, you will probably have heard how crazy our real estate market is. It’s expensive. It’s competitive. For years now, it made a lot more sense for my husband and I to rent our home. We even renovated the kitchen in our rental in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

But recently we are getting older and we thought it might be nice to have something to call our own. So we started looking. And my mom starting looking because she loves houses and she loves to do research. She and my dad are retired so it’s sort of like House Hunters but in real life and you don’t spend any money.

For months now she would send me links to houses and then add the next time I called her, “Daddy thinks that is just crazy for a postage stamp lot and a house not much bigger”.

Finally I started looking in earnest. And since the last house I bought was in Croatia where there is no MLS and people just price stuff with whatever they feel like pricing it that day, I can’t look at real estate only within my budget. Just in case someone got it wrong. Or in case I find something I wasn’t expecting.

I searched for all prices – from $300,000 mobile homes (yes, that’s the price for some of the mobile homes around here) up to stuff I would have to win the Powerball to afford. I found a house out of my budget, but what seemed like a good deal for someone who had the budget and started researching to figure out why it hadn’t sold 3 weeks in because around here that is like 3 years.

Enter Zillow. Enter ‘Nearby Houses.’

“Whoa, what the heck is that?” was the first thing I said. The next was, “oh my God that’s our house!” I knew we had found it.

I knew it before I even called the agent or went to see it. My husband wasn’t so sure.

I drove over and took a picture of the gate, which looks like this:

“Ok that’s interesting.” he said.

“And it has six acres,” I said.

“You’re kidding.”

And that’s how sometimes things that seem to be too good to be true aren’t. And how sometimes other people really don’t want what you want (our house had been on the market for months at the price we thought was a steal).

As you can see, though, it wasn’t exactly show ready.

It had been abandoned for 12 years, including a Rolls Royce that was growing moss in the carport. Look close and you will see the windows had been rolled down a couple of inches for a long time too.