July 2016 – The Biswolds

House Hunting – Final Day

Saturday, Day 3, was my turn for an epic meltdown. I woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept searching for homes, I expanded our search even more than we already had, and I continued to come up empty every time I hit the ‘pets’ filter. My wife rolled over and asked me if I was ok. I couldn’t be strong anymore. I just completely lost it and cried until I didn’t have any more tears to shed. We talked for a long time about life, what was right for our family, & what our next step should be. Ultimately we decided that I should call my boss and lay it all on the line. Tell him everything we were up against, from the ability to buy a house to the pet unfriendly rental scene in LA to the school deposit we were losing for the boys next year to the inevitable roof repair and loss of equity in our own home. I scripted out what I would say and even though I felt like a boulder was sitting in my stomach I knew I had to make the phone call. I cry talked at him for at least 15 minutes before he could get in much more than the transitional, ok’s, and I understands. He asked me exactly what I was asking for and I very clearly said, is it too late to take my Baltimore job back and say no to this job? He promised to make some calls and call me back.

We headed to Manhattan Beach and away from the roach motel to get something to eat. We had been up for 5 hours with no food. Normally I would be very hangry but I had eaten a boulder earlier and I had been unsuccessful at digesting it up to this point. My wife and I spent the time at brunch talking about how things might all shake out, wondering if she could still get her job back, about what would happen if we got an offer on our house, about our kids school and if they would re-enroll them next year if we begged. Around 12:20 my boss texted, “call me”. I was prepared for the inevitable talk where he would ask me to reconsider, remind me about the job I had committed to, etc…I have the say, from the way that my boss handled my initial tear filled explanation, to this second call, to a reassuring text from my boss’s boss, I was pleasantly surprised with their approach. They stated that we’d been up against more obstacles than one should have to deal with in these circumstances and that if at the end of the weekend I wanted to back out that none of the decisions were too far gone. But the kicker…don’t give up…you have two more days, keep an open mind, continue to look at places…we’ll talk on Monday.

A combination of guilt and pride put me back in the driver’s seat of our GMC Terrain. The fact that our rental car was nicer than our hotel is just dawning on me. We had discussed driving to Santa Monica but I drove with one purpose in mind, the open house in Culver City. I stopped by a home that our realtor had given us an early preview of because it hadn’t officially hit the market. It wasn’t bad but it was still a property I’d call twice and half. Twice our current home price and half the house. On a fundamental level looking at these properties is like a throw up burp in your mouth….each one takes you by surprise and you can’t exactly spit it out so you just swallow it and keep on moving. Next I drove towards Culver, the acid still burning my esophagus. My wife was silent and so was I. I feared admitting where we were going in anticipation that she would ask why we were bothering. As I pulled up in front of the house it was going on 2pm, two hours post start time, and the “For Rent” sign was no longer up. My wife frantically pulled up Trulia convinced they had already found a renter in the last 110 minutes. I nudged her along dismissive of her search and we approached the front door.

Before I could knock a middle aged woman with a warm disposition and a kind smile opened the door. “Hi, I’m ‘Sue’, I’m the owner” she said as she reached out her hand to shake mine. We exchanged pleasantries and she told us a bit about the house. Her and her husband ‘Tom’ had the same renters in for the last 5 years and they figured an upgrade was needed. They had lived there for the last 6 months while they completely remodeled the place. It was 1800 sq feet…quite possibly one of the biggest places we’d seen. It’s an old Tudor home, which I didn’t find out until later was my dad’s favorite. I’ll write plenty of future posts about him but for now it’s important to know that he was taken way too young and that if you could only split my life into two halves they would be named: ‘Pre 12-6-2002’ and ‘Everything after it’. His opinion has always and will always mean a great deal…i.e. Tudor houses, one more check mark that this was the right call.

Sue showed us around the house and told us about Culver City, it was a great neighborhood especially if you have kids…Fourth of July, El Rincon festival, and Halloween were all huge events here. At some point along the tour we shared that we were relocating from the east coast out to LA for my job and that my wife was an attorney but would most likely have to re-take the Bar exam. When she showed us the downstairs sunken bathtub we told her how much the boys love bathtime and I took the opportunity to show her a picture of them in the bath with outrageous silly faces and mohawks (or Ho-Mawks as my 2 year old calls them). The kitchen was completely redone, it was 3 bedrooms and 3 baths. We had looked at a property the previous day that had one bath and we were trying to convince ourselves it would be just fine. The back patio was spacious, beautifully landscaped, and nicely shaded…perfect for the Labradors that had eliminated 90% of our housing options J

We went back inside and she handed us a lease application and asked if we had any questions. I nervously explained, with tears in my eyes that we had dogs and that we weren’t sure their stance on pets but that we understood most owners were not willing to rent to a family with pets when there was so much interest from others without pets. Tom chimed in, “Ok…well, depends, what kind of dogs, how old are they, are they well behaved…three pointed questions that flowed easily into one due to his mild mannered tone. My wife took over from here…they are great, they have been potty trained forever, they sleep all the time, they aren’t big barkers, and we bathe them once a week. Three truths and a lie…I’ll leave you guessing on this one. With a rare flash of brilliance I brought up the fact that we own two homes, our primary residence and a rental property. I talked about understanding the importance of finding good tenants that will take care of your house and are low maintenance. We promised to never call them about a loose cabinet (which one of our tenants called us about once). They said, well, if you are interested then fill out an application and email it to the address at the top. Just so you know, we’ve had a lot of interest and we’d like to decide soon.

We thanked them, went out the front door, looked at each other, and mouthed….”oh my God”. Both of us walked at a steady gait towards the GMC and hopped in. We both began to blurt our random thoughts: that place is so nice! They TAKE DOGS! Holy crap! The owner are great! Is this real? Pinch me! What should we do? We need to fill this out asap! We need to write a letter to them and include pictures of our kids and dogs. Lots of interest already…we have to make these people want us. Where is the nearest Fed Ex office? Once we regained consciousness we googled a Fed Ex Office and drove the 2 miles there. We have always operated well under pressure and with last minute deadlines. The day before our wedding day we drove to a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, bought a trellis, and tied it to the roof of my wife’s 4 Runner that had 230,000 miles on it with leaving ourselves 45 minutes to shower and meet our family for dinner. My wife filled out the 2 lease applications and I wrote them a letter with pictures of our family at the top. One of them had our two year old laying on top of the dog beds with both our labs. We printed it out in color and stapled it to the lease applications. The last hour had been an absolute blur and we frantically drove back to the home we could only hope and pray would be ours. We knocked on the door and Sue said, “oh my, you came back, we were just talking about you, we realized you didn’t leave any contact information with us”. One of us told them we wanted to hand deliver our applications. Sue took one look at the pictures and said, aww, aww, Honey look. She said, we want our tenants to be happy and we would love to rent to you.

I’m not sure what happened next other than us affirming that’s exactly what we wanted to hear. We talked logistics…how they would get us a lease to sign, how to give them a check. My wife offered to drive to their home almost 2 hours away to make it happen. They told us that wasn’t necessary. They would email us the lease and we could mail the check back to them. Sue told us that the previous tenants of 5 years had been a gay couple with a Great Dane. Thank goodness for the lesbians that came before us! Sue told us to go take pictures since the place was ours. We shared that we would move out mid-July but probably be in temp housing at first since our plane would arrive well in advance of our furniture. They told us it was silly to live in temp housing and they offered to leave the couch and a bed there for us. Are these people real? I wanted to pinch myself or them but I didn’t want to wake up. As another couple of people came to tour the house Sue walked them around, apologizing it was taking so long but encouraging us to stay. We talked to Tom about his career and where he had moved to and from. He told us about their 5 acre farm with 200 avocado trees and promised to bring a load of them when they came to meet us and check us in. Sue freed herself up from the guy explaining why his credit score was so bad. Once they left she hugged us. I almost cried for the 13^th time that day…maybe I did.

I have bought 2 homes in my life and the minute I walked into them something felt right…call it what you will, good vibes, good energy, faith, a feeling, whatever…Bluebell was a 3^rd that sucked me in immediately. This was going to be our home. The park is a stone’s throw away and a great elementary school is walking distance. I’m a 15 minute commute into work. A brand new metro stop was just built that can get my wife into the city in 30 minutes. Our boys will be happy here, our dogs, my wife. Every single thing, except for the Pacific Ocean, had felt wrong from the minute we arrived in California…until now. It’s funny how a couple of hours can change your whole world. I believe that someone was looking out for us. And I believe in the immeasurable value of meeting people face to face, looking them in the eye, shaking their hand, and having a good old fashioned conversation where each person knows the character of the other by the end of it. I can’t wait to tell our boys this story and help them understand this never would have been accomplished on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever new apps are available when they get their hands onto technology.

Lindblade

House Hunting! Part Deux

The next day, Friday, we arrived at the realtor’s office with a fresh start in mind and told Marianne that we were prepared to widen our search even if it meant a longer commute. A longer commute in LA could mean an extra hour per 10 miles but we didn’t care, we needed a suitable place for our kids and dogs to live, period – end of story. We headed out to Culver City to see 2 of the 3 less promising properties. Marianne had spoken to the owner of Bluebell and unfortunately they lived out of town and were not available to show it today. They would, however, be having an open house from 12-2 or 12-4pm on Saturday. Marianne encouraged us to go there on Saturday…it appeared we would be on our own on that day. Globe wasn’t as bad as anything viable we had seen in the previous day. It had new hardwood floors, it was clean, and it had a back yard for our dogs. It was small and it only had one bathroom but we could make it work for a year if necessary…ok, property on day #2…still on the list. Property #2 on LaSalle was BAD. It was a duplex, which is popular in LA, and the owner lived in the home in the back and we would have the home in the front. The owner was a middle aged eccentric artist that came to the door with possible pajama pants on and no bra on. She walked us around this terribly dirty place that made me cringe to think of my boys living inside of it and explained how she’d left the lights off so that we could see how ‘light and airy’ the home was. Clearly she was smoking something or wearing light colored glasses because it was dark. Out back she explained that once she was able to clear some of her hoarding collection to one side of the garage that the tenants could store things on the other side. She didn’t make any promises that it would be within the next 5 or even 10 years but my best guess would be never. We looked at a home in El Segundo which was so small that the master bedroom wouldn’t even fit our bed much less anything else but again, we kept it on the list. Today was about finding ways to make this decision work, not eliminating options. Good schools, a yard, a weird neighbor that may have been preparing to burn a body…we can see beyond it. We visited a home in Westchester that I cannot believe the owner had on the market. The cabinets were literally coming off of the walls and the paint was coming off of the cabinets. It was small and it was another dirty property. I get not having the money to get a maid but try sweeping, vacuuming, or mopping….it’s not that freaking hard.

Our last stop of the day was a little beach bungalow in Hermosa Beach. It was a place we had asked to see but that our realtor was trying to convince us was not right for us. It did not have a yard but it had a back patio. As we were short on options I asked to see it anyway. We pulled up and looked 3 blocks down the hill to see the Pacific Ocean…being close to the ocean gives even the worst place automatic points. My wife remarked out loud, I just hope it’s clean, please be clean! It definitely had some upgrades to the kitchen and the bathrooms but it was quirky and had dark wood paneling in the bedroom. It was 2k more than our current mortgage and at this point in the trip my inner monologue kept repeating: ‘what the hell, what the hell, who do these people think they are?’ over and over again. All I can see are these tiny properties that cost an arm and a leg. But I’ve been called a cheap a*s once or twice in my life and I embrace it. I look over at my wife who was smiling, for the first time in over 24 hours and it seemed real…she said it was quirky enough to make it work and that being near the beach would not make her feel trapped. There was a wood chipped path just a few blocks away where we could walk the dogs and the back patio, although small, could work for them during the day. I would label day 2 ‘forced optimism’. We walked out of that house and promised to submit a lease and get our financial documents and first born ready to send over!

We grabbed a sandwich from a little café and walked to the beach. It’s actually fairly annoying that my wife can read my emotions like a book. She said: “you don’t seem as happy as me that we found a place.” I worried about how small it was and how I felt like it might work for a year but probably not beyond that. If it could be avoided, I didn’t want to uproot the kids 2x in 2 years. After all, we were already moving them across the country away from everything they know and their family. I just didn’t know if I could do that to them again. Not wanting to burst anyone’s bubble, I promised we would get the lease together tonight.

Friday night we had a planned dinner with my wife’s friend from college who lived in Culver City. She and her husband have 3 kids: a 6 year old and 3 year old twins. We showed up at their house asking for her running route so we could just shower and go to dinner afterwards. Honestly, the less time we had to spend in our roach motel the better. Their house was so great and I found myself wishing we could have looked at a place even close in stature. I was not hopeful about Bluebell anymore, earlier when we previewed the other two Culver properties I looked in detail at the property description and in an instant it crushed my hope again (small dogs, cats ok). I wanted to explain to every owner that they slept all the time and barely ever barked. I wanted to recount the instance when our home was broken into in Baltimore City and they just stayed behind the gate and did nothing. I wanted to show people pictures of the kids laying all over them, riding them, pulling their tails. But in most of these places we weren’t meeting the owners, we were meeting property managers or no one. How could we prove ourselves? How could we compete with everyone who didn’t have a dog (or two) and presumably more money? This had been a frustrating, daunting, and emotionally draining experience and we were only closing in on day 2. Dogs in driveway

House Hunting – Part One

Now that our current home is market ready we focused on our trip out West. Our flights were booked, rental car reserved, hotel blocked….we would fly to LA on Thursday morning and leave on Monday. 4 full days to find a house! Although we wanted to bring the kids along so they would have a better understanding of what ‘moving to California’ actually meant, we knew it would be too hard on them with the long flight, getting in and out of the car properties, and no real fun activities planned. With our countless hours spent on Trulia, Realtor.com, MLS listings, Hotpads, West Side Rentals, Zillow, etc we had at least 30-35 properties into our realtor to set up the 4 day schedule. With our financing options for buying a home up in the air (again, could be a whole separate post), we planned to focus more heavily on rentals with only a few ‘for sale’ homes on the list. These bright eyed optimistic east coasters landed safely at LAX, grabbed our rental car, a quick salad, and headed to meet our realtor. California here we come!!

Our realtor, we’ll call her Marianne Khors for the purposes of this and any future blog posts, was a Manhattan Beach caricature. She was adorned in head to toe David Yurman jewelry, size, I sh*t you not, 11 feet in black flats that cost more than the contents of both of my suticases, and an arrogance that would be tough to cut with a knife. She had us sit in a conference room and after discussing how qualified she was to do the work that she does (always a red flag for me) she proceeded to take us through an exercise she self labelled “I’m going to prove you up”. This 15-20 minute demeaning exercise consisted of her placing a print out for each surrounding neighborhood in front of us and telling us we couldn’t possibly afford to live there. Manhattan Beach…look at all these places you can’t afford to live. Next, Hermosa Beach, no way, I mean look at these prices. Culver City, you’ll never be able to buy there. Aside from Ally McBeal type flashbacks where I imagined myself form tackling Marianne or just flat out punching her in the face, I wanted to scream, NO SH*T SHERLOCK, that’s why I didn’t ask to look in Manhattan Beach. I am actually shocked my wife kept quiet. I can and do hold my tongue in most situations like that even when I’m steaming inside. Liz has a short temper for rhetorical questions and being treated like a second class citizen. I would occasionally glance over at her and think, hmm, she’s going to lose it on Marianne any minute.

She introduced us to her daughter and partner, ‘Tiffany’, who would be driving around for the day. Before we left she handed us a list of 9 homes, all in Redondo Beach because that’s the only place peons like us could even hope to live. We boths got the feeling these were the only places she lined up for all 4 days. I swear she strategically placed house #1 first. It was right across the street from a gas station and right near the freeway and it was a total dump. It was a dump that would cost us 1k more than my current mortgage with 1/3 of the space and 100x the filth. When we got back into Tiffany’s car we joked that it could only get better from there on out. Boy were we wrong. We proceeded to see townhomes, condos, and single family homes where we either questioned how they could be so expensive, asked why they were literally built on top of each other, or felt like we needed to take a shower after touching the inside. The amount of un-pet friendly rentals was unbelievable to me. It would turn out to be our biggest barrier. 90% of the rentals on the market were not pet friendly. Of the 10% that were you would need to look very carefully at the description that would typically describe cats or small dogs being acceptable. We have 90 lb. Labradors…2 of them. Of the very limited places that accepted dogs, most satisfied the 3 D’s: dark, depressing, or dirty. Some you could get a 3 for 1 deal!

I looked over at my wife at some point during the 9 house tour and saw that she was on the verge of tears. When my wife gets close to tears and hasn’t recently given birth, things are bleak. I whispered to her, ‘just keep it together for another hour or so’. I’m definitely the more emotional one but I can generally keep it together when she is a mess and visa versa. My stress symptoms began to manifest themselves physically with an unforgiving headache that was a wicked combination of 4 hours of sleep, time change, not enough caffeine earlier that morning, and my flight receptors telling me to get out of LA and get out fast. We went back to the conference room, the scene of the earlier ‘prove you up’ exercise, and recapped our day. We had 2 rental properties to line up in Culver City the next day, another place we certainly couldn’t afford to buy so why even bother looking? We asked about a property in Culver that we had sent her earlier in the week to inquire about whether she had reached out to the contact on the Trulia listing….which was met with a very confident response: “you didn’t send me that property, I would have remembered that one.” Liz promptly pulled up her sent emails showed Marianne the email with the listing attached. Again, met with an overconfident response: “well, you sent me so many emails!” Marianne left a message for the contact listed…fingers crossed. We promptly said goodbye but Marianne felt the need to follow us out and say things like: “see, I told you that you’d want drugs by the end of the day”, “we’ll find something”.

My wife sat in the passenger seat, put her head in her hands, and did what her mind had been telling her to do all day…she cried her freaking eyes out. Once she had a good long cry she told me how much she hated Marianne and that whole ‘bullsh*t exercise’ she put us through. After she vented about our realtor she cried again. She told me she thought we were making a terrible mistake. I didn’t know what to do so headache be damned I drove to Culver City. I knew we would see it the following day but a friend of hers lived there with her family now and if it helped end our day with even a littlest glimmer of hope I had to try it. We drove by the house on Globe – not terrible but didn’t seem like the best location. Then we drove by a home on LaSalle that seemed neglected. 2/3 didn’t seem promising. Then we drove to Bluebell (real name removed). As we made the drive we noticed it had the feel of a real neighborhood even though you are in LA. Huge trees lined the sidewalks and people were out walking. When we pulled up in front of Bluebell we saw it was right across from a big park. It was a bustling park with a kids of all ages playing and participating in volleyball, baseball, and soccer. Ahh, our little glimmer of hope.

That night we grabbed a pizza and went back to our hotel. We were spent and just wanted to eat and sleep. I googled and the address of the hotel that relocation services had booked for us and as we got closer and closer I feared for our home over the next 4 days. We pulled into the Candlewood Suites in Hawthorne. It was a stone’s throw from LAX airport and it was just as bad or worse than most of the homes we had seen earlier in the day. Our room overlooked a giant trash site with oversized dumpsters (a picture is worth a thousand words). We got into our pajamas, silently ate enough pizza for the hunger pains to subside, turned over and went to bed.

East moves West

The Biswold’s Take on Cali! So I guess for my first post I should tell you a little bit about the Biswolds. We are two mommies raising two boys (4 & 2 years old) and we have two Labradors. We are East Coasters and proud of it. I grew up in Maryland and my wife grew up in Pennsylvania. Recently I was presented with what I call a “no-brainer” promotion at work….with a small catch….we’d have to relocate to California. Did I mention most of our extended family lives w/in 3-5 hours of us? My wife works full time too, she is a criminal defense attorney and has worked at her job for 9 years. Hey babe, about that career…you can restart it right? Our 4 year old is finishing up his first year of Montessori pre-school and our 2 year old is set to enroll in the same school in the fall. My mom picks up the kids for us once a week…Gi-Gi gets quality time with her boys and we get date night which has morphed into workout night. My wife’s parents are in Philly and her dad’s health has been a roller coaster the last few years. Her sister and her wife…yes, they are lesbians too….I will write a ‘gayest family in America post’ about us at some point! Anyway, they live in Philly with our two nieces who we absolutely adore, but not more than our boys adore them. All of these reasons were literally screaming in our face…DON’T GO! WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE ALL OF THIS? WHY TAKE A RISK WHEN YOU CAN TAKE THE STEADY ROUTE? So after all of this…we’re in, we’ll do it, I’ll throw caution to the wind (very unlike me), it will be an adventure, there is more diversity in California, the weather….these were all things we old ourselves to make us feel better about the vast number of reasons we had to JUST STAY PUT.

To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know if we’ve made the ‘right’ decision…in fact, we may never know. One thing we both agreed on, we would never know until we tried, and we may always question what it could have been like if we took the leap. Ever since committing to this decision about a month ago I have wanted to carry around a tiny closet door with me that I could open up and scream into whenever I needed it…which would probably have to average 5-7 times a day.

Telling family and friends was the next order of business. The build up to that was unbearable. The only thing I could equate it to is preparing for a final exam in a class that you had skipped all semester. You basically want to just crawl into a hole during exam time because you know you are going to disappoint the teacher and flunk the test. The reactions we got vacillated between extreme excitement, sadness, shock, sadness, sad but happy, and anger. I tried to prepare in advance for all the emotions but it didn’t prepare my gut for the emotional turmoil and guilt. Looking into my mom’s eyes and seeing the sadness in them, trying to send reassuring text messages to loved ones that we wouldn’t lose touch, and bawling my eyes out on the phone with my sister in law because I wanted to reverse the damage that had been done…all of it hit me like a sucker punch to the gut.

Now onto the business of relocating. My company has tried to make this as seamless a transition as possible but there’s nothing easy about selling a residence and finding a new one. So here we are 2 appraisals, a market analysis, home inspection, termite inspection, roof inspection (which could be it’s own separate blog post), multiple meetings with our relators, furniture moving, power washing, carpet cleaning, de-cluttering, removing any evidence that real people actually live inside of our home later, and the house is officially on the market! In all of our free time we are still working full time, raising these two crazy kids, and frantically searching every real estate/rental site out there until midnight every night. Averaging 5-6 hours of sleep per night while juggling the above mentioned activities, well, sucks.

Up next…our house hunting trip. 4 days of California ~~bliss~~ horribleness.