adventures in home shopping

So, I took a long lunch yesterday and visited (and re-visited) some properties with my realtor. We started out at a place I've been looking at in West Oakland. It's a cute little place in what is turning into a nice little oasis neighborhood. For those of you who aren't local, West Oakland doesn't have the best reputation and large parts of it deserve that reputation. This place was nice, though, and had the benefit of a large basement level that had been converted into an extra room and bathroom. It would make an ideal sound studio. I was wary, however, due to the extensive work that needed to be done on the roof, the kitchen, and the floors throughout. Still, all that would come out on the Seller's end if I made getting it all fixed a precondition of sale. We left, and I considered the little Queen Anne's cottage an ongoing option.

The next place was a home I'd been interested in before, but had gone off the market for a few weeks. It only a couple of blocks from MacArthur BART, which was very appealing to me. There were many things about the place that I liked: interesting floor plan, lots of built in wall cabinets, good wood floors, a fully updated kitchen, lemon and pear trees in the back, and a somewhat odd DIY covered and elevated back porch that extended a good twenty feet into the back yard. It was enclosed with plastic windows, and a small window opening to allow someone to feed laundry out to a long pulley operated clothesline. My realtor guessed that whoever had lived here was afraid to go outside, but after seeing the bathroom, I suspected that she simply couldn't get up and down the stairs. The bathroom was incredibly tiny, with no shower, bright pink bathtub and toilet, and lots of guardrails around the bathtub. The attic entrance was directly over the bathtub. It looked like at some point the bathroom had been moved from a normal sized room at some point and that a little hallway had been turned into the bathroom instead. It would have to be completely redone and an existing "Bedroom" turned into a bathroom. The home was across from a High School campus, which made it a bit noisy, but not too bad. What was a killer was the family of three pitbulls on one side of the house, and another very loud barking dog on the other side. As soon as they saw activity, the dogs began barking furiously, spurring each other to new heights of volume. The family of pitbulls settled down after about 10 minutes, but the other dog kept on furiously. That became a dealbreaker. Between having to completely redo the bathroom and the potential of non-stop barking, this home fell down on the list.

We scratched another house off the list due to complications with current tenants and possible other offers that had been made and headed down south to Fruitvale. Fruitvale had a similar reputation to West Oakland, but has been seeing significant changes over the last decade. That said, certain parts are still referred to as "Murder Row". Fortunately, the parts I was interested in were a good ten blocks from there. Crime stats for the area were reasonable, or at least reasonable for Oakland.

Thus, the third house we actually looked at was one I'd had my eye on for the last two weeks. A cute little home on 36th ave that needed an appointment in order to view. We hadn't been able to look at it the last time we checked properties, but now had the chance to check it out. It was occupied by a family of six: husband, wife, grandmother, and three kids. We quickly moved through the house, but I knew after about three seconds that there was no way in hell I could evict this family. I let my realtor know that I'd seen enough and we left, with the kids peering at us through the back fence. He let me know that they were renting, not owners. I hope that whoever buys the house buys it as a rental property. The thought that I was looking over the home with the intent to dispossess them was the most horrible feeling I've had in some time. I might as well have been wearing my top hat and greatcoat, twirling my mustache.

All this took us back to the first property I looked at a week and a half earlier. Less than half a mile from Fruitvale BART, a nice tree lined street, low crime (and extremely sturdy and pointy fence as well), no yard to have to deal with, two stories, and in pretty good shape across the board. I had been uncertain about it when I first saw it, but after seeing over a dozen properties in my price range, it's clearly the best deal available (not counting the dream victorian that was never to be mine, despite my weeping a million tears). What I didn't know then, but know now, was how easy it would be to replace the carpet upstairs with a hardwood floor and how trivial it would be to reroute the washer and dryer outlets so that they lead INTO the building instead of the back yard. Most everything else visibly wrong with the property is long term cosmetic fixes and improvements. Clean up the floor, soap and paint the walls, re-paint or stain the cabinets... nothing that I couldn't move in and to over the next several months or years.

So, I'm placing an offer with the bank.