The weather's been mostly wet this week and when the clouds clear we're getting some beautiful vistas of the hills turning green across the valley. This morning we woke up to another river of fog covering the Salinas Valley, one of our favorite things about living on Steinback Mountain.
Speaking of weather, in spite of the mostly cloudy and foggy days we've been having, surprisingly, we're still generating significant power from our new solar panels. Since the system went online at the end of October, we've produced 156 kW hours of energy which is 17% of our consumption. When the longer days and warmer days return, we're expecting to have a 12-month average of 50% and a 50% reduction in our utility bills. Sweeeeeet.
Since the last post, the folks from C. L. Frost came and installed the counters in the guest house and the BBQ room half bathrooms. Then they finished the backsplash in the guest house bath. Again, we're so impressed with the quality of work from these guys.
Friday, Keith from Della Mora plumbing showed up and started installing the fixtures for the two bathrooms. By the end of the day, he was able to install both toilets and most of the sink and shower hardware. Hopefully, he'll return Monday and complete the plumbing work.
Late Friday, like around 6 pm, Winnifred and Felipe from Glasswork by Design showed up to measure the guest house shower for the sliding door we want. They tried to talk us out of the Vigo model now on sale at Home Depot for 20% off ($932) and, instead, upgrade to a similar door made by Cardinal. That decision will depend on how much they quote us on their model and installation which we should know by Tuesday. As they were leaving, Felipe told Winnifred in Spanish that he'd done some plumbing work on our house a few years back. Winnifred translated that Felipe remembered the house was for sale at the time. Want to hear that story?
The right place (online) at the right time. How a redfin addiction turned a dream into reality.
For most of our 16 years together, we lived on campus in faculty and staff housing. In its former life, CSUMB was Fort Ord and when the University opened two decades ago, there was a lot of military officer housing available for CSUMB employees to either rent or buy at very affordable prices. The Monterey Bay area is one of California's more pricey places to live, so "subsidized" housing is a nice perk. At first we rented, and then we bought and renovated a two bedroom, 1 1/2 bath townhouse where we stayed for almost a decade. It was a cool place and we loved the one-banana commute to campus. But the bummer with faculty housing is that you have to sell it back to the University when you retire so we knew we would eventually have to move off campus. Originally, that's why we bought our house in Palm Springs, the place where we thought we'd retire. But that's another story….
So, when the real estate bubble hit, we started looking for another house. Our friends Patty and Peter who also lived on our street had recently moved to a nice 50s era neighborhood in Salinas. Peter was a Realtor and they had seen our desert house and knew of our love of MCM furniture and architecture. To make a very long story much shorter, within a few months we were living a few blocks away from them in a 50s ranch style house that was a bit boring but had lots of potential. It was a "short sale" that was anything but short. But although we immediately started fixing the place up, we didn't stop looking for other houses, ones with more MCM style. We found a few cool post and beam homes and even made offers on some but others always beat us to an accepted offer.
We, well at least one of us, had an addiction to the real estate website redfin.com and one day came across a listing for the house we now own. But, five years ago, the asking price was over $750K and we had a very strict policy to never consider anything over $500K. But we could tell from the pictures, it was a unique and very cool house with authentic MCM character. And a million dollar view!
Then, one fateful Friday morning, the listing reappeared on redfin at $499K. We quickly called Peter. Peter quickly called the selling agent. She told Peter she was just about to take the listing down as she already had an accepted offer but she would be willing to have us look at the place that morning and she would take a back-up offer. We drove up to the site with Peter and fell in love with the place before we made it through the front door. Completely bummed that once again someone else beat us to a great MCM house, we decided to go ahead and put in a full price offer.
Monday morning Peter called. He said we should sit down for what he had to say. He then quickly explained something called a BPO (Brokers Price Opinion) which we learned often happens when a bank is selling a home about to go into foreclosure. Apparently, they invite three different realtors to each appraise the house with three different values: The highest price possible on a good day in a good market, the lowest price possible on a good day in an okay market, and what they think it's worth that day in the current market. So they did a BPO for the house and the nine values averaged out to $460K.
Are you sitting down? Peter then said the buyers with the accepted offer were not able to get financing so the house was ours. But, if we still wanted it, we had to sign new paperwork forcing us to buy the house for $39K less than we were willing to pay three days earlier. There was only one catch: We had to sell our house we'd only been in nine months and we had to sell it fast. Thanks to Peter, we sold it in two weeks and for $50K more than we paid for it. And that's how we landed on Steinback Mountain.
"Okay, it's not a Bird chair, but it's nice and warm. And the green light matches my eyes…."
