In Which The Odd Couple Make Decisions That Lead to Naught

Some updates here.  The short story is that the tax auction sale was a bust.  Like, we didn't even try.  Why?  Well, we finally got a person to do a title report for us.  It was odd.  Frantz never again responded to any email I sent, which tended to be ones offering him more work.  I tried the first title person he recommended who was super unhelpful, telling us that tax auction sales are really dangerous and you basically shouldn't do them but she could set us up with an account at her work place (?).  The next title person I tried from Frantz's suggestions was super helpful and was like "Hang on... Imma send you all this stuff."  And he did.  It was lovely.

It was through all those documents he sent that we recognized that the land was within an HOA.  But hoping against hope that the HOA wasn't terrible we looked into it and... no.  Nope.  Just no.  

After sorting through the annoying bits of legalese that were basically about what the HOA was and who could do what to whom on the board, we got to the first rule, which was anyone building in the HOA had to have a home that was at least 30,000 square feet (that's 2,787 square meters).  Um... really?

With a rule like that, we knew we couldn't build the way we'd need to on that land.  There definitely wasn't enough south facing land.  And with an HOA that specifies home size... I mean, I can't think of another reason for that other than they only want rich people.  Which I find gross.  So we just stopped reading at that point in case we discovered a more heinous regulation like that every home had to have an aquarium with rare salt water fish and a squid to which they fed caviar daily to keep it from eating the fish, or everyone has to subject their home to a specially trained mold sniffing aardvark twice a month.

Smells ok over here

So we didn't bid.  Sure, we could have bought it, maybe sold it later for more, but it's a lot of work for something that might make us money and is a bit of a risk.  We got back to looking the usual way.

As such, I emailed Garrigus real estate, the folks that actually get back to us.  If you recall, they'd basically told us before the tax auction that they were pretty sure we were too far away for them to really help but agreed to leave the possibility open.

Then I saw the perfect home for us, cheap, on their site.  It was small but airy with beautiful wood rafters.  It had a detached garage, a workshop, and a well already installed, plus some solar.  I anxiously waited for Chris to come home and then told them we wanted to see it.  

Well, they got back to us that that property was already under contract, and besides it was a cash only sale.  I had mistakenly thought that a mortgage would count for cash only sales, but they do not.  This property wasn't financeable because it wasn't permitted.  So... idk about you but we can't hand over $300K!

Furthermore, if we are going to work with them, we needed some kind of mortgage pre-approval.  We did get one with Adam, but I never got the thing.  So we figured we might as well go through the song and dance again.  I talked with their financing person who followed up with an *easy* online application that I believe took me an hour (easy, my ass), and then asked for lots of documentation some of which we don't have, like 2020 taxes and quarterly statements for all our retirement accounts (they seem to have monthly statements, or no statements depending on the account).  He said it would take between 24-48 hours after we sent him the things.  I sent them Tuesday.  It's Saturday and we've not heard anything.

But to be fair, I kill't my phone Thursday night.  I was feeling stubborn because my phone is fine except the battery seemed a bit dead.  And since we're trying to buy a home, it didn't make sense to me to go to Verizon and pay them an additional however much per month, which raises our bill, just so I can have a new phone that I don't even want, I just want my now phone to work.

As you may recall, I'd made an appointment to have my phone's battery replaced last time I wrote.  Well, that morning, a guy called from the place to say that my phone is too old so they have none of those batteries available and I should call around.  I called around but no one had the battery nor the willingness to change it.

So I bought a battery online.  Now, you might think that I would have called back original store and asked if they could do the replacement for me since I had a battery, but I was feeling stubborn and there are a few YouTube videos about how to do it, and I used to fix computer hardware... so I tried to do it myself.

I do believe it would have gone fine if the instruction video (the battery itself came with no instructions) had mentioned that the glass front has a black material behind it and they need to stay together at all costs!  How was I supposed to know?  The shitty little tool to separate the glass front from the body simply slipped between the two in a few places.  At first I thought that I'd just have to buy a front glass replacement too, but alas, I went to turn it on and ... nothing.  I charged it for an hour.  Then pressing the power button gave me a haptic signal and plugging it in gave me a tone.  I was relieved.  But after charging it all night, neither of those things continued to happen and it refused to turn on.  

I'd go into it about how we've embarked on a journey of switching carriers because of this and the super frustrating task of buying a used, unlocked phone for me, but it's annoying and there's little funny or interesting about it.

Regrouped again, we saw a home in our price range in Campo.  A bit further than we'd like, but I think anything we can afford that has any chance of being something we want will be.  It's listed as a "unique dome house."  The pictures on the site didn't show all that much, but we decided to see it.

We contacted the agent on the listing, not Garrigus realty.  It's so far away for them that it wouldn't make sense for them to try to show it to us and the listing agent said the owner could show it to us Saturday at 1300.

The plan was to bundle up the dog, see the home, then try to find some snow for the dog to enjoy (and us to enjoy the dog enjoying) because of all the rain we've had this week.  And it did rain on the way there!  Actually, it hailed.  It's very exciting when that happens here.

via GIPHY

We got to the property a little early and the owner's own dog let her know we'd arrived.  She came out looking largely confused.  She had faded green striped hair and hands that have done work.  I needn't have worried about whether or not I wore a bra today; she clearly wasn't conservative.  

I introduced us and apparently, the real estate agent had never told her we were coming.  She asked for 10 minutes to clear up inside, which we thought was super nice of her.

We asked if it was permissible for us to look at the rest of the land while she did.  The property has some beautiful rocks all along it.  The hope was that somewhere on the 4.77 acres we could find room for our earthship.  She told us we were welcome but admonished us to be careful of the snakes.

SNAKES???!!?!

FuckShitFuckityfuck!

I mean, I'm ok.  Really.  We wandered toward the back of the home where we saw a degraded deckling (that's a teensy deck) with a hot tub stuck into it.  We later learned it was non-functional, but still, we want that kind of thing and a deckling with the right size hole in it exists.  Then we looked at the back of the house where we saw a cat escape a tiny kitty door into an enclosed cat space.  So cool!  We definitely need something like that.

The cat space is under the ladders

We walked to where the hill started behind the house, intent to see the land beyond.  But the walk was so steep, it occurred to us that if it's that difficult to get there on foot, it's nearly impossible for us to get through with a vehicle laden with building materials.  Hrm.  So we abandoned the idea.

Super pretty, snake infested rocks

Then Judy led us into her home.

This home... It's such a difficult thing to think about because it does actually have a lot of the things we want.  And also, both Chris and I see great potential in the structure, and even somewhat in the land.

Of the things that it has that are grand for us are:

• A beautiful view to the south
• A well with amazing water (Judy insisted on pouring us each a cup which was awkward with our masks while she hadn't donned one)
• An extra structure with a bathroom and room that her daughter was living in
• A super nice seller who seemed to want to do right by whomever bought
• A beautifully unusual home structure that my brain likes
• Right off a main road, which means it's easy to access though the noise from it exists
• Fenced in until the really steep hill
• Relatively up to date wiring (house was built in the 80s)
• A deck, though it's to the south and we'd want to put a green house there
• The roof has been redone in the past 10 years
• It's a price we can probably afford

And then... there were things that weren't so great for us.

• We hate the inside and would want to basically gut it and remodel everything
• The existing staircase is basically a ladder as you can't go down it facing forward (again, gut and remodel)
• Unless we found a way to access the land behind the hill, there's no place for an earthship
• The whole site is banged up and needs TLC.  Judy showed us the many sheds on the property and they're either rusty metal boxes or broken wooden lean-tos
• Power lines run right over the front of the property
• It's an hour to Chris's work, which might be ok but...
• It's not what we're looking for
• Snakes.  Judy says that the 4.77 acres of this property extends to the one acre of very flat, very shrubby land across the street... where the snakes really like to hang out a bit beyond where the mountain starts uphill.
  

I took a number of pictures of the inside with her permission.

The kitchen

This picture doesn't well do justice to how slim the kitchen was.  I can't call it a galley kitchen because it's a more or less round home, but it was similar.  Judy said that she was offering a $500 credit on all the appliances as they are all terrible.  In fact she showed us the stove on which she'd put a glass plate to hide the fact that it looked like a rampaging team of hippos had played a few games of hurling over it.  

This is Judy's adorable dog Blue with striking blue eyes

This is if I turned 180 from where I took the last picture with the ladder stairs off to the right.  You see as how the whole floor is tile.  I can't stand tile floor.  I really hate it.

You can see how there's a window that peaks into the upper level

She says that she only uses this stove for heat as it's cheaper than the furnace, which makes sense.  Of course, we'd want to bury the north side of the home for thermal mass and open the south side to the sun for heat... but that doesn't seem super doable for this home.

The main bedroom on the ground level goes out onto a deck

The bathroom was hidden around some weird twists with washer hookups which Judy doesn't use

This is the main room upstairs with the window we saw before

The bedroom upstairs

This whole place reminds me of Jim Qwilleran's hexagonal apple barn turned home if you have read the Cat Who series.  Just... small.

I almost wish that this was the right property for us.  I can see so much potential in this home.  I'd just... as I said before, gut everything.  That kitchen seriously needs to go, not just the appliances Judy says are done.  Pull up the floor, replace it with bamboo or something similarly nice and renewable (yeah, tile is good for many things... I just hate it).  Knock down all the inner walls (apparently none of them are load bearing) and make sections more with furniture, half walls, and a central structure around the center pole that does hold everything up.  Tear the carpet out of the upstairs and redo both bathrooms.  Redirect all the windows so the home could be retrofitted more in the earthship style.  The stairs would need to come down from the upper level along the wall at a gentler curve.  But then you'd have to move the front door as it would be right where the stairs would need to go based on where the upstairs floor is now.

And that's just the main house.  I can see just from the outside that the other home-like structure needs at least as much work, though it's a smaller area.  And then there are the grounds, which Judy swears will be free of the zillion cars and several boats, and masses of trash when she leaves, but the land itself needs a good amount of sprucing.

If this was just right for us, I don't think that the hour commute for Chris would be an issue, but even though this seems like a really cool home and I'd love to see how it could look with a lot of work, neither of us can imagine spending the rest of our lives on this land.  If the home were $1.75K less, I'd say we should buy it, fix it, then sell it for a lot more, but... no.

Chris and I nobly held our tongues until we were well clear of the house and in the car driving, to express our thoughts on this home.  I was well disappointed.  This is a good home and a blissfully unusual one... and not what we want.

This reminds me of the issues I so frequently have of knowing what I want and trying to find it.  Honestly life is easier if you don't have a good idea and just go with something you like.  I remember wanting certain types of clothing way back before internet shopping was quite a thing.  I ended up becoming mediocre at sewing because I wanted things no store sold, including some fun lavender and white striped thigh highs made out of an old nightshirt in high school that were definitely not in fashion at the time.   I still have them somewhere.

I had seen some land in Jamul advertised the night before, so, since there was no snow at all, I suggested we find it.  This land is listed at $35K, which is ridiculously cheap here.  We could see that it was near Hilary Dr, but that it didn't touch it.  And so we'd need to build some kind of road and get an easement.  But... at $35K for land, we could probably afford a short road.  

About 3/4 of the way to Jamul we recalled that we've looked at something on Hilary Rd before when we looked at the GPS and saw...

Do you remember this?  Well, our fears were confirmed when we got to Hilary Dr and saw this: 

So, we couldn't get down Hilary Dr.  We looked at the map and decided to try going around to the other end of Hilary.  I swear we've seen something on Hilary before...  

We headed up Wisecarver and onto Mark Lee, which I have nicknamed Marianas Trench Dr.  I had to pee when we left Campo but going into those road ravines was like sitting on a water balloon and just hoping it wouldn't pop under me.  

We got to our turn off onto Emily Dr and...

Yeah, that's the road

Chris understandably announced that we could not take our Golf over that particular gorge.  So... we left.  Along Rt 94 I made Chris stop so I could get out and relieve myself along a fence that sat just lower than the main road's line of vision.  I just couldn't.  I felt like the dog with his recent urgent peeing while I peed for at least a minute plus.  You may not think that's long, but for peeing it is!

Relieved though dispirited, we returned to two cats who were at least self righteously mollified that we hadn't missed feeding time.

I then went on the real estate site and found another property that was nearly perfect for us.  It's about 50 minutes from Chris's work, already off grid, made of even a bit too much wood for me (I prefer to have my walls more earthy), has a deck, a grill, appliances that look like they're pretty new...  It's $2.5K... cash only.  They do mention a possibility of some specific type of lender, but if it's a cash only sale in general, it means it's not permitted.  And it's 500 square feet (46.5 square meters).  So we'd have to add an earthship for sure lest we kill each other, but the site is less than 1 acre!  So, there's not likely enough room.  It seems like a no go as well.  *sigh*