Homes With Places for Cats

We've looked at far too many homes this week.  Too many because 1. I'm still exhausted from my last trip for work, 2. I am still catching up with my real jobs from my last trip for work, 3. I had my second vaccine shot Wednesday and now I feel like carp.  Well done carp.

Don't eat me!

So, we knew we couldn't get the home in Alpine because we weren't going to offer so much above the list price for something that wasn't going to save us money on a monthly basis.  We got back from camping Sunday and checked the listings.  (Looking for a home in this market reminds me of how a friend of mine described looking for a woman to date.  You have to check online every day, as if it was part of your job, and be positive and hopeful about each prospect.  And when it doesn't work out, you go right back to checking the listings Every. Single. Day.)

So we saw a home at 24339 Manzanita Dr in Descanso.  Idk why, but I like Descanso.  It's got the teensiest "downtown" with approximately four stores/restaurants (Idk how many; it all flashed by so fast I couldn't count), that definitely try to give off an old west kind of feel.  Normally I don't like things "old west-y" but for some reason I find this charming.

This home looked from the pictures like it was meant to live right on the side of a lake in that it was on a steep hill such that you often see by a lake.  Now, there really aren't many lakes in this part of CA, so that just made the home on such a steep hill seem... odd.  We got there up a very narrow winding road where turning around required a 17 point turn.  The drive way was probably new and likely nothing anyone would ever want to go down.

Well, that's steep

The door was on the other side of the house off a raised deck of sorts but only of the sort that's meant to be a walkway, not an actual hangout spot.  While Melissa fiddled with the key I used the trick she taught me to find dry rot in the wood.  It was present in some places.

Here it is from underneath

The home has a lot of nice things about it.  The kitchen is open and large enough.  It feeds into a living space with a wood stove that was actually quite nice.  Oddly the room has different floors and we're not sure why.  I can only figure that at one time there was a hallway or wall that came down to make the space larger.

One of the odder things we found was the slant of the floor.  It definitely slanted down towards the downhill part of the house, which didn't make me feel all that safe despite the concrete under the home.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, though admittedly, it took us a long time to find the second one despite it being right there off the main room.  I guess we just walked past it.  The house went down a steep, dark staircase that seemed really out of character with its sunny rooms.

And underneath the stairs was the perfect little room for cats!  (Or Harry Potter.)

I'm not sure who put a light in and put laminate flooring in this tiny space, but thank goodness they did or you'd expect to find skeletons in there.

Basically, this home had nice enough rooms, the outside was... meh.  I mean, it was a hill with pine trees of the sort you find in CA (which means they were less floofy triangles and more squiggly long trunked muppets).  There wasn't a fence for animal non-escaping but fences can be installed.

But in the end, while the house was nice, it didn't flow -except downhill.  Everything right now seems overpriced, but this one really seemed overpriced.  Even Melissa, who normally has a very politic answer to "How the ding dang blazes are they charging this much for this relative dump?" Suggested as how it seemed maybe, potentially overpriced.

There was an odd hallway outside the downstairs rooms that made me think it hadn't originally been the outside of the home.  The siding was... having a hard day.  All the patio kind of areas were concrete and... well, there's nothing awful about concrete but it isn't nice, per se.

Here are pics of the rest of the place...

What is that weird deck thing?

To think I used to not know of crawl spaces

Oh you siding...

 

Oh dear, driveway...

We also saw a cute large spider downstairs that could have been a black widow.  None of us volunteered to turn it over to find out.

And then there was this curiosity... a container that looks like a gorilla's body with humanly pronounced breasts.  Huh?

And a packet of BBQ sauce

Well, the nice part is it's both easy and requires not much when everyone agrees that a home is not meant for you.  We moved on the following day to see 32251 Acorn Trail in Campo.

Generally speaking, Campo is just really far away.  It's cute, and even has a nice campground with a lake (that presumably residents can visit).  There's the pirate ship, which is just cool.  There are nifty homes like the doll house home we saw and the cabin with the lovely big yard.  But it's really far away.

Chris has become resigned to the fact that he will have to commute at least double the 20 minutes he does now to get to work when we find our home, but when you go over tripling the commute time it starts feeling real ick.  This home in Campo was one hour and 10 minutes away from his work.  And that's if you take boring Rt 8.  When we left this home, Chris said he wanted to take scenic Rt 94, which I was all for.  Except that the beautiful trees, hills, and sky soon turned into Curving-Lane-The-Barfenatious-Evil-Step-Twin of Lose-My-Lunch-Lane.  And then the hour and ten minutes it took us to get home seemed far less pleasant.

The difficult part was... we really like this home!  It's absolutely not our style and yet... we really like it.  It's light, it has enough room, the yard is big enough and secure enough for the dog.  It has a fireplace that's tiled into the wall in an ugly way.  The entire floor is tiles (sad). The wall paint is... ok, but after a while you need something with some character other than delicate yellow and tea rose.  

The sellers had put some rather gaudy furniture in the home that conveyed with it (meaning you buy the whole kit 'n caboodle).  We just talked about how we'd sell it, but it was surprisingly comfortable.

The front is totally unremarkable

Here's the hall if you turn around after entering

A reasonably nice, large kitchen

A fugly tile ensconced fireplace

Here's the other end of the hall which wrapped around the kitchen and made a much nicer touch than a straight hall just down the center of the house

The living room with weird furniture and in delicate yellow.

I really loved how this home had slanting ceilings.  They were present in the bedroom too.

On the way to the bedroom there was this bizarre seeming shelf/cabinet situation that reminded me of the manufactured home on Eagles Crest drive (was that what it was called?) in Alpine.  See?

But the walls did have neat cut outs in them, though the sellers saw fit to put a giant anal plug in this one

But the other side of the master bedroom had the most exciting spot for cats ever!  We'd clearly have to make them wall steps up to it.  Melissa said it had a special name and people put stuff like tchotchkes on them.  Not that I don't have tchotchkes.  I do.  I just... don't want to get up there and dust them.  Ever.

The other bedrooms in this home were of no particular regard.  They were rooms with mirrored closet doors.  Idk why there are so many sliding mirrored doors in CA.  Seems to be a thing.  Sure, I like to use mirrors, but the entire door?  It's just begging to get dirty and then you can't see anything else!

The bathroom off the main bedroom was very interesting.  Separate shower and tub (I got in) and a room to itself for the toilet.  I've always said it made more sense to separate the areas where you clean yourself from the area where you put germy ick.  This maybe isn't exactly what I meant.  I mean... it's a challenge to think that you wouldn't feel trapped in the tiny toilet room while you were taking care of business.

And then the closet for the master bedroom was through the bathroom.  I guess that does make sense... You wash up, then you get dressed.  I just never thought about it like this.  It would take some getting used to.  What if your partner was popping zits and you needed to get dressed?  Idk...

Lonely toilet room...

The outside was great!  Even Chris said he'd have no qualms about just letting the animals out.  The side of the house had a cute little strip of yard.  It reminded me very much of when we were watching Big Dreams, Small Spaces with Monty Don, a British gardening show.  Some couple or other wanted to do a Japanese style garden and they had a nice back yard with a weird spit of land along side the house.  They did well with it so I figure we'd find a cool thing to do with it too.

It had a tree

The garage for this home was huge.  I don't think I've seen a garage this big since moving southwest.  Yeah, I grew up in a home with a three car garage, one stall of which was used for storing crap, but the garages in NM are teeny tiny.  We squished our small VW Golf into our home's one car garage and still managed to fit the washer and dryer and a bunch of tools and sports equipment.  

This garage also had the washer and dryer in it.  The dryer glowed blue like it was taking your single socks to the sock dimension with no subterfuge at all.

Here socky, socky, sock...

We well and truly like this home.  But at $379K, we'd only be saving a little on our monthly bills and it is so far away.  Then, you have to add the fact that it's in an HOA. 

It was only $128 a month, but still.  HOAs just seem to me like a good excuse to exclude people and be intolerant in general.  I'm sure there are HOAs that are fine on those regards, but I just can't shake that feeling that I'm going to move in and everyone is going to look the same and talk the same and think the same... and there I'll be like the new kid in class who has pickled herring sandwich for lunch and now all the other kids call me "stinky fish girl."

We told Melissa we'd have to see what the HOA rules are before we'd be able to make an offer.

Now here is where I tell you the newest reason that Melissa is 1. too good for all of humanity and 2. needs to be paid more.  (I have no idea how much she makes but I'm certain it's not enough.)  So, she told us it can be difficult to get the HOA rules (which are oddly referred to as CC and Rs).  And if she couldn't get them from the realtor, she'd have to ask title, but sometimes you just couldn't get them until you're already in the thick and you just make it one of your conditions for which you can back out if you find out about the mold sniffing aardvark twice monthly inspection and just can't put up with that.

But Melissa did find the CC and Rs.  She sent them to me.  They were something like 84 pages long, and that was only one of a few documents.  Those 84 pages were all in legalese.  I read to about page 16 and died.  I couldn't really understand it nor did I care, except I do care deeply if they mandate mold sniffing aardvark inspections.  Not that I have something specifically against aardvarks, you understand.

So I wrote to Melissa and said that I understood that we needed to get through it because time is always of the essence when you think to make an offer on a property.  But I'd had my second vaccine shot that day, I had a headache like the devil's bowling alley had sublet my skull, and I just couldn't.  In addition, I'd found another home on Zillow we'd like to see.

You know what she did?  She read the whole farging 84 page document and then wrote her own document elucidating the salient points of it!  Do you know what I did?  Well, I woke up early this morning to take the car to the car doctor, where I sat for a number of hours and worked.  Did I read Melissa's document?  No.  Working did me in.  

When I got home, I died in bed from the renewed bowling activity in my cranium and the new sensation that my joints were the creaking of old leather arm chair joints until it was time to go see the new house.  When we got to the new house, Melissa asked if I'd read the document, and I honestly had to say "no."  So she just told me, "Well, I think the biggest thing that stood out to me is that they only allow you to have two pets..."

She graciously allowed as how we could ignore that, but we're fairly rule following folk and we would not be comfortable with that.  So, basically, she spent however much time it took to get through that vile manuscript so she could simply deliver us the answer that the HOA wouldn't accept our whole family, and therefore we aren't making an offer on it.  

Someday maybe I'll be kind like her.  But I wouldn't count on it.  In all honesty, I'm just tired of feeling like I do everything for everyone (which isn't entirely true), and truly I'll never read legalese with the alacrity she seems to.