Carving out our new home
Stephanie and I have been looking forward to taking a linocut class with Eric Rewitzer for a long time, but we didn’t have the time (or space of mind) to do so until February. The class took place at 3 Fish Studios, Eric and his wife Annie’s inspiring studio, set in the Dogpatch with an incredible view of San Francisco Bay.
I knew in advance that I wanted to make a print of our new digs to use as a card announcing our change of address. I had in mind a very controlled, high-contrast style, but the end result looked almost dreamy, like an illustration from a children’s book (about a girl looking out the window on a rainy day).
Compared to what the other folks in the class produced (check out Stephanie’s amazing print of her hennaed feet), mine turned out kind of plain, but over time its quiet simplicity has grown on me. Plus it’s our home! We ended up sending all the cards to family in the US and France, but I held on to one ghost print (a second print from the same inking) to eventually frame and hang.
Tracing a reversed photo of our building
Transferring the sketch to linoleum with transfer paper
Ready to carve
Our pad in 8 bits
Courtesy of Google Maps “Quest”
Rethinking the Refrigerator
In the half-year since we’ve been back in San Francisco and resumed a life many would call “normal”, I’ve noticed that our refrigerator habits appear anything but. I’m starting to think that’s because we spent a year without one—and have yet to “recover”. Imagine a year without cooking (other than a handful of cooking classes), a year without leftovers, a year without being able to preserve food from one day to the next.
You can probably guess that our fridge is almost always empty. Like bachelor-empty. In fact every two weeks, just before we go grocery shopping, it’s completely empty, except for a lone stick of butter and a jar of mustard. This has a lot to do with our shopping and cooking habits—we’ve almost completely stopped buying “refrigerate after opening” and frozen foods. We rarely cook enough for leftovers, though when we do, they get incorporated into meals the following night or two.
What we do keep in the fridge are the things that need frequent replenishing: vegetables, cheese, yogurt, white wine, mustard, eggs, and butter.
It’s like we’re using our fridge more like a root cellar, and less like a black hole. All this makes me wonder about refrigerator design, and whether there are any models optimized more for keeping fresh vegetables fresh, and less for keeping giant bottles of soda cold? Might such a fridge be more energy efficient?
As it turns out, our “new-to-us” fridge has two humidity-adjustable “crispers” and one short but wide temperature-adjustable “chef’s pantry” (whatever that means). Unfortunately one of the pantry lid hinge pegs had broken off, so in my new role as a homeowner, I ordered and installed a new left hand side refrigerator pantry drawer support. How hot is that?
Earthquake welcoming committee
It’s been ten days since Stephanie and I moved into our new home. Compared to past moves this one went so smoothly that I wasn’t quite sure what to say about it. So I’ll just tell what happened.
On the Saturday of our move, we woke early to pick up a 10ft U-Haul truck we’d rented for the weekend. It took almost no time to load with the few things we’d accumulated in our studio, so we were on the road towards our storage unit in Santa Rosa by 10am. After a few errands en route, we arrived in time to meet Mark Levitt for lunch. He’d offered to help us unload our storage unit and load the truck, which gave us a great excuse to catch up.
We had the storage unit emptied in record time. I think it took us under 2 hours, and most of that was spent going up and down the freight elevator. We were done well before our dinner plans, so we had time to squeeze in a beer (or two) at Russian River Brewing Company. Day turned into night, and we all headed out for sushi with Nailah’s family (Stephanie’s old dance partner in crime). Even though the first half of the move had been so painless, we were tuckered out, so we retired to the house of some friends who were out of town.
We were up early again on Sunday morning for our date with destiny: meeting the sellers at 10am to get the keys. We got there just as they were picking up the last few odds and ends—they’d only just moved out the day before. Casey and Kyle showed up to help us unload the truck, which we emptied in an hour flat. Perfect timing for lunch—which I think they felt guilty about, given how quickly things went. Nonsense! Sweat was shed by all; we earned it.
On the steps of our new home
We’d had a mattress delivered that afternoon, but the bed-frame wouldn’t be arriving for another day, so that night we slept on it directly on the floor. Around 5:30 in the morning I was awakened by a slap from Stephanie and some intense, prolonged shaking. Our first earthquake on our first night in the new house! What were the chances? In my sleep-addled mind I thought to myself that I should probably get under the bed, except it wasn’t possible because the mattress was on the floor! Eventually the shaking subsided, and I quickly fell back asleep.
The story of an armchair and sofa
The first armchair and sofa I bought, for my first apartment, took me six months to pick out, and then an astonishing six months to arrive. In the interim, the store where I bought them filed for bankruptcy (and eventually went out of business). In fact I was already in my second apartment when they were finally delivered.
My old armchair looking swank in my Carrboro apartment
Two years later I loaded the armchair and sofa into a trailer for my move to California. They arrived almost unscathed—except for the hole that my bike pedal tore through the upholstery in the back of the sofa (thankfully out of sight when set against a wall). A little over a year later, Stephanie and I moved to San Francisco together, and of course my armchair and sofa came with.
My old sofa in our Pine Street apartment in San Francisco
Adventures in real estate, part three
After discovering that someone had made a bold preemptive offer on one of the coolest condos in San Francisco we’d seen, our real estate agents’ advice was to wait and see. Occasionally people make impulsive decisions and back out once they’ve had a chance to think it through. Miraculously, they were right. We discovered a few days later that the preemptive offer had been withdrawn. The sellers were still accepting offers—and expecting them to be submitted less than a week after the open house.
On Friday, November 4th we learned that 5 offers had been made, including ours, and that the sellers were going to do a multiple counteroffer to all parties. We were still in this game! Though we tried not to get our hopes up, we eagerly awaited the counteroffer. The night passed with no counteroffer. The weekend passed, no counteroffer. The more time that passed, the more our idle minds couldn’t help but imagine making it our home.
By midday on Monday, the belated counter finally arrived. It was a single page document requesting the purchase price be raised over our initial offer. And since it was a multiple counteroffer, we had no idea what the other offers had been, or what their counteroffers looked like. And we had to respond by 9pm the same day. This put us in an interesting position as we’d already made an offer at the top of our price range (not to mention over list price). Our real estate agents advised that if we really loved the place, we should consider responding with an offer over their counteroffer—to separate ourselves from the pack.
It’s easy to start down the slippery slope of “what’s another 10k?”, but if the purchase price went up, so would our down payment (which effectively acted as the upper bound on what we could afford). So we decided to split the difference, and made a counter-counteroffer slightly higher than our original offer but lower than their counteroffer. It was a funny moment, I felt good about sticking to our budget and countering their counter, but also wistful, figuring that we were effectively throwing in the towel (surely someone else would pony up).
So you can imagine our surprise the next day when our real estate agents called and said “We have some potentially very good news for you.” This was not the call we were expecting. They basically said that if we were willing to adjust one of the non-financial terms of our counter-counteroffer, the place was ours. OMG!!! Yes, yes of course we’ll do that. That night, November 8th, we were officially “in contract” on the coolest condo we’d ever seen, a mere month after starting our search. We were agog at our good fortune. We were in a complete state of disbelief.
Our condo will be the top unit of this cute two-unit building
The living room has a bay window and a wood-burning stove
Without a doubt, this is the coolest kitchen I’ve ever seen
The dining nook/sunroom opens out to mini-deck
Adventures in real estate, part two
Since starting to seriously look at real estate at the beginning of October, Stephanie and I made a habit of trying to check out at least one or two open houses every Sunday. We weren’t being lazy, it’s just that there wasn’t that much available which met our minimal criteria: a two bedroom flat for less than 700k (preferably much less) in a broad central swath of neighborhoods from NoPa to Dogpatch (and possibly parts of SoMa).
The blue box highlights our general area of interest
Once we’d gotten a good baseline of what was already on the market, and ruled most of it out, we realized that finding a place was going to depend wholly on something new being listed while we were looking. We also knew that the market was going to cool down around Thanksgiving and not pick up again until after the Superbowl. I pretty much expected we’d still be going to open houses in the Spring.
And then, just before the weekend of Halloween, our fourth week of serious looking, I got an email alert for a new listing with the following blurb:
Modern meets Historical in Hip Mission Dolores! This 3BR 1BA completely renovated home features soft & hardwood floors, new electrical, central heating, new windows, period details, wood burning stove in the living room, TONS of storage, chef’s kitchen w/Wolf range, stainless appliances & counters & Scavolini cabinets. A bright sunroom features built in shelves & an eating nook w/custom table for 8-10 people. Ship stairs lead to the attic bedroom which features roof windows, walnut floors & ample storage. On a quiet street with a Walkscore of 94, it’s close to Dolores Park, Bi-Rite, Delfina, MUNI, BART & more! Add to that the active street community with an active Google Group & annual block party and all that’s missing is YOU!!!
Real estate descriptions tend to be pretty formulaic, but something about this one caught my eye. And good thing too, because there were no photos. I pinged our agents for more details, and they said that the photos would be up on Saturday. When I finally saw them, they took my breath away. We went to the open house on Sunday, and it was even better in real life. The kitchen was to-die-for. There was a cute sunroom/dining nook. There were two bedrooms downstairs, a lovely single bath, and an attic-space upstairs that had been converted into a third bedroom. People were crawling all over the place to get a look at it. This was going to move fast.
The obvious appeal and popularity of the condo tempered our initial reaction. Nothing else we’d seen either in photos online or in person came even close to the level of finish and character of this place. We figured we didn’t stand a chance, so we figured, let’s give it a shot. I emailed our agents that afternoon to say we wanted to make an offer. They called back to tell us that someone had made a preemptive offer for more than 100k over list price, well above our price range.
Continue reading Adventures in real estate, part three…
Adventures in real estate, part one
We arrived in San Francisco on September 16, exactly 13 months after we left. I took one look at the rental market on Craigslist and gasped. It seemed that rents had doubled in the time we’d been gone. Well, not exactly, but two-bedroom apartments were going for more than double what we first paid for our one-bedroom five years earlier. Even if we stuck with another one-bedroom, we’d easily be paying $600-800 more per month than a year before.
And so, at the end of our first week in San Francisco, we found ourselves attending a four-hour long first-time home buyers class. We didn’t even have jobs yet! But I knew that eventually we would. In the meantime, I had nothing better to do than get educated. More than anything, I didn’t want to fritter away a year or two of rent hemming and hawing if we pictured ourselves eventually paying into a mortgage. Let’s bite the bullet now (while housing prices have stabilized and mortgage rates are at historical lows).
By the middle of our second week in San Francisco, we both had respectable job offers. So I called up some mortgage brokers and explained our special situation. If we had to wait a year or two to rebuild our financial history, I wanted to know that sooner rather than later. But on the contrary, I got the sense that given our spotless credit, lack of debt, and my remaining savings, our year-long absence from the workforce wouldn’t pose that much of a problem as long as we could provide documentation of our previous salaries, had at least a month or two worth of paystubs from our soon-to-be new jobs, and hadn’t changed careers. This was a watershed moment. If the banks would lend us the money, we could do this.
On our third week in San Francisco, I met with a team of two real estate agents that had been recommended to me by my tax accountant. They seemed professional and straightforward—so I decided to start working with them. That weekend (Oct 9th) we visited more than half a dozen open houses. Nothing really won us over, but we got a good sense of the properties on the market and within our price range. The very next day I started my new job (Stephanie had already been working for a week) and the day after that, we moved into a furnished studio with a month-to-month lease (after having spent the previous three weeks crashing with several very generous friends).
Continue reading Adventures in real estate, part two…
