Weekend of Shattered Dreams

Well the wife and I spent the weekend in the San Francisco area looking at a couple of different areas in hopes of finding a good area to concentrate the house hunting for our upcoming move.

Saturday we spent in the Walnut Creek/Pleasant Hills area. Oh man downtown Walnut Creek is just wonderful and feels like a great place to be. There were shops and restaurants all over and it felt like a good place for a late evening stroll. They have a beautiful auditorium, Architect is from Portland which seemed like a weird coincident, that I thought just put the icing on the cake. I love the theater and all that kind of stuff so that’s a huge plus for me. So after a quick drive through that area we kept on going out of town and ended up in Pleasant Hill where we found this awesome little neighborhood of Spanish (or at least that’s how I characterize them) style homes. We figured these are all 1.5-2 Million dollar homes. We saw one for sale so grabbed the flier for it. It was only a mere 990K. But was a really nice home being a little over 2,600 sq ft. It had all the amenities that we could think of. Great kitchen with granite counter tops, dual convection ovens, jacuzzi tub and walk in shower in master bath, loft, 4 bedrooms, living, dining, family great room into dining and kitchen, built in gas grill outside, tiled outside eating bar and great landscaping. Man we said if that's what 990K buys man we should be able to find what we want for a reasonable, well for the Bay Area anyways, home that is close to our 1,600 sq foot home here. Well were we wrong. Most of the houses we looked at were 780K-850K for 1300-1800 sq ft homes built mostly in the 70s and early 80s. Nothing was even close to what we were looking for. Some had good features but all of them had some major work we would want to do to it to make it more what we wanted. And at 800K+ we just didn't feel like having to put a ton of money into remodeling.

Well the next day we went looking on the peninsula. We started over in Pacifica before we even met the Realtor my wife pretty much vetoed this area. It reminded her of some of the older costal cities in Oregon. Well I wasn't too heartbroken as if I wanted to live in a town like this we could move back to the Oregon coast for a lot cheaper!! The next area we visited was San Bruno this reminded me of my home town of North Bend, Oregon big time. Lots of older ranch homes with pealing paint and of course that Ocean smell. We really weren't too impressed with this area. Then we went onto San Mateo where we actually saw one home, with a detatched living area, that was probably the best house we saw all weekend. But the biggest issue with the peninsula area was the prices most were again in the 800k+ range and were only for 1,000-1,200 sq ft home all of which were probably 40+ years old maybe. After this day we felt the other houses we looked at looked much better to us today then they did yesterday.

Well to finish out our trip we headed over to the Dublin/Pleasanton area to just take a quick drive to get a feeling for that area. We liked that area and our Realtor from day one was going to look in the Dublin and San Ramon areas.

Well I'll report more as we know more.