The How, Part I

Almost everyone we know who’s bought a house suffers some form of PTSD from the experience. Sure, there are the few friends (you know who you are) who decided to buy, knew someone who knew someone who was selling the perfect house, and they all lived happily ever after – without having to deal with the trappings of real estate agents, the drop-everything-to-go-see-a-house-before-someone-else-swipes-it-up lifestyle (for many, this eventually turns into a “oh-hell-just-put-an-offer-on-it” compulsion), or the heart break of falling in love with a place only to find out that it (rather, its sellers) don’t love you back.  We were not so lucky. Our search was long and full of heartache. I literally cried over a house. Like for a few days.  Freakin’. Stressful. It’s almost masochistic to relive such an account, but enough visiting friends have asked us, “How did you even end up looking for places out here?” that the journey seems worth documenting.

I’d been half-heartedly joking with Aaron for a few years that we should just move to the hills and live in a camper. But it all got real when I stumbled upon a 2 acre lot just 15-minutes from our work, with an amazing view — on clear days, you could actually see the ocean. I’m not even kidding. The listed price seemed within our reach! So we decided; we were going to build. And it was going to be pre-fab, repurposed, solar-powered, with gray water… in short, the [greenwashed] works. So we dove in. We got pre-approved. We got bids on septic and foundations. We started shopping builders and architects. Then we found out that city fees and permits for our project would start at $40,000.  Forty thousand dollars!  Before even breaking ground. So we scaled back. And back and back and back. We danced in and out of the realities of the tiny house movement. We tried to think of creative ways of skirting city fees, which included composting toilets, solar panels, and yes, a camper. But there’s one commodity that is difficult to take “off grid” in Southern California, and that’s water. Drilling a well was simply not a feasible endeavor on that hillside parcel. Plus, you need a permit for that. We would need city water pumped in. City water meant city fees.

It was mid-November as we stood surveying the plot, wracking our brains for a way to make square pegs fit through round holes, still trying to dream about where fruit trees might be planted and barns might be built. The sun baked down on us, and we thought, “Geez these south-facing lots are hot in the fall.” A neighbor came down offering assistance and pointing out the property lines. He also pointed out that we should not let Simon run around so far away from us; after all, there were rattlesnakes, mountain lions… I think it was in that moment that it was over.

A panaramic view of the canyon from the top building pad

If you look REALLY hard, you can see the water through the “v” in the hills.

We moved on. We fell out of love with that particular property.  Maybe it was self-deception, sour grapes per se. Maybe it was just coming to terms with reality. But we were hooked on the general idea – peace and quiet, room to roam, the potential for harvest. What that piece of property lacked in particulars, it offered up to us in potential and vision.

We continued looking for other property and running into the same expenses for new construction, when it occurred to us… Ya know what’s really repurposed and reused? An existing house. So we abandoned the idea of building and opted to look for a small home on some land. I’ll omit the tedious details, except to say that I’m amazed now at what we would have convinced ourselves we could live in just to be on a ¼ acre of very steep hillside in Orange County. I was desperate.

We expanded our search radius. We found areas outside of The OC where you could simply get a lot more house and yard for your dollar. We fell in love with a craftsman on ½ acre. A half acre! Boy howdy.  And it had an old run down barn. And a pool! We were in love. It had some amazingly high-end renovations. It had been sitting on the market. We put in an offer the night we saw it. So did someone else. As it turned out their offer was the same as ours, but they had met the sellers when they visited the house and made a “connection” with one another. My eyes rolled as our agent relayed this info to me over the phone, then I felt myself wilt. The sellers accepted their offer, rejected ours. I felt like we never even had a chance. That’s the one I cried over. People told us not to get emotionally involved. But really, how can you decide whether you want to spend that much money on a place without picturing your life there? And once you’ve pictured it – your family, your life – and decided that you want to move forward, you’re emotionally invested.

Of course, as the saying goes, it was one the best things that never happened to us (or here’s that recurrent theme of self-deception). The craftsman was at the top of our price-range, in a not-so-great neighborhood with not-so-great schools.  We would have both had to work full-time, commuting, with Simon in daycare. Having animals would have been tricky because the location was still relatively suburban. In short, it would have been a very different lifestyle than the one we’re currently living.

We put in an offer on another craftsman in the same area. Looking back it seems like an act of frantic desperation. It was a neat house, with a farm-style kitchen, on a half-acre lot. I still wish I could pick the house up and put it here.

I still swoon over the vintage details of that house.

I mean just LOOK at that family kitchen. Do you see that antique stove?!

But we got cold feet. When we factored in the commute, the neighborhood, all of those factors I mentioned above, we just couldn’t pull the trigger. If we were going to make the move, it needed to be “just right,” and we felt like we were settling at that point.

We decided to take a break. It was the holidays. The market was slow. We booked a last minute flight to visit family in Texas and Florida, and decided to revisit the home-buying process (or not) when we got back.

During this time, I tried to convince myself that maybe I was just feeling a desperate need to own something. It was around this time that the landlord-garden negotiation happened (which I described here). Maybe I just needed my own tiny yard to do what I wanted with. So we looked more locally, back in Orange County, at smaller plots. And then the 950 sq. ft 2 bed, 1 bath house on a 4700 sq. ft. lot at a very busy corner of a major highway sold for $400k. Could we have bought it? Yes. Did I want to? Abso-freakin-lutely not.

I grew depressed, feeling we would never find something “just right” for us in California. Frankly, we felt stuck in a lose-lose situation. We could buy a small house on a small lot for a big price in Orange County and spend all of our time working to make the mortgage payment. Or we could buy a bigger house on a bigger lot, but have no time to enjoy it because we’d be spending it all sitting in traffic. I wasn’t ready to give up, but I had a hard time deciphering our next move. So I poured myself into work, became generally grumpy, and asked the landlord if I could at least paint the living room of our rental house something other than gloss white. I got no reply. Here I was yearning for the actual sound of crickets, but instead I got the figurative kind; silence.