Can This Be Our Home?

After a whole week of vacation, we felt a bit more refresh and ready to tackle with our house hunting project again. We found this house at least 2 months ago. The price was high back then. Now it is still high for our taste, but it has come down a little since then.

Both Tom and I thought this place has potential during our first walk; in fact, it has been the only house we both agreed on so far. We were only able to walk around the outside then, as it was empty and we only drove by, no agent with us.

We came back with an agent this time. The floor plan is opened, flowing from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen then out the backyard. There are plenty of natural light in all the rooms, ok, maybe except the master bedroom. The house is a remodel of a 1950s home.

There are lots of pros, including its open floor plan, natural lights, a nicely landscape front and backyard, new professtional Viking appliances, location, great neighborhood and school district, and a peek-a-boo view of the ocean over the neighbor’s rooftop.

There are a few cons. The biggest problem being the bathrooms. They redid all the bathrooms, but they didn’t change the configuration of them. So they are very very small. There are 2.5 baths. There isn’t a standard full size bathtub. They installed what they called “Japanese soaking tub” in one of the full bath. It is deeper but shorter. So there is no way a man can fit in there, maybe a Japanese man, but not a big tall American man!!! We do have some ideas of how to fix this issue if we do get the house and have the money to remodel it to make it really nice. The small size also applies to the closets, no walk-in.

There is no direct access from the garage. The garage is attached to the house, but if you need an opening, you would need to cut through the master bedroom! But you do have your own driveway. This is not a true thing for most new build. So even though we don’t have direct garage access to the house, we can park more than two cars!!!

There is no air conditioning here. The claim is that the weather in SoCal coastal area is so mild, that perhaps 3 days out of a year, the temperature would peak over the 90s. True, but it is a very difficult concept for someone who lived in Minnesota and Texas to grasp. I have gotten used to these modern day “necessities”!

The kitchen is not as big as I would like, given the cook I am. The cabinets had been refurnished, but they are the old shelves. Tom is looking for a kitchen island. To me, that is a nice to have, if the design is good, it is fine without one. They left the two old ovens there, so the kitchen is ready for a full Thanksgiving cooking rotation with the number of ovens there.
We think this place has lots of potential even though it isn’t everything we ask for. The price is still high as I mentioned before. We plan to put in an offer, a low price offer. But we are not being unreasonable either. Having one CPA and one ChEn in the household, the agents cannot really talk over our heads on statistics and trends!!! We shall see.

To the universe, we want this place. Please make this happen. I am sending out my request, according to the book “The Secret”.