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.