This is the story of our canyon house on the Bay Area Penisula, which we purchased in 2009. Because the story of a house is really the story of a home and the people who live there, this is also a story of our family: how we came to reluctantly embrace life outside the most beautiful city in the world, how we (sort of) started to fit in to a community very different from anything we’d imagined for ourselves, how our lives came to fit the contours of the home, and the home came to fit the contours of our lives.
It is a story of trying and failing at design, a story of small improvements, a story of torn couches and stained carpets, a story of falling trees and a cold swimming pool on a hot day, a story of drought and storm, a story of a cat, a story of good neighbors who exceeded our expectations in every way and of neighborhood politics as absurd as anything you’ll find in a novel (and yes, I did eventually write that novel, the novel inspired by this very neighborhood.
The story, like the house, is in progress. I hope you enjoy it. First, the backstory:
The move from city to canyon
We purchased our canyon house in 2009. We’d been living for five years in San Francisco, in a wonderful little neighborhood in the outer avenues, just eight blocks from Ocean Beach. We had purchased our city house in 2004, when I was pregnant with our son. We loved the neighborhood, and it had served us well as parents of a newborn, who quickly became a toddler and then a preschooler. We were within walking distance of the beach and Golden Gate Park. We spent endless hours feeding the ducks at Spreckels Lake, rowing boats on Stowe Lake, and watching the bison in the Bison Paddock.
During this time, however, my husband’s work moved him to Palo Alto. The rush hour commute to and from Palo Alto was brutal. As a full-time writer who works at home, I can work anywhere, geographically speaking. While San Francisco takes up a big chunk of my heart, my husband takes up a bigger one, and I didn’t like the hours we lost with him when he was commuting to Silicon Valley.
As Kindergarten approached, we were faced with San Francisco’s outrageously complex public school system, which makes it difficult for kids to attend school in their own neighborhood. So we started looking for houses “down the Peninsula,” the corridor running South of San Francisco along 101 and 280.
Long story short, we looked at a lot of houses in Palo Alto, but we were turned off by the distance from San Francisco, the tiny lots, and the congestion. We also looked at homes in Woodside, a small equestrian town that we loved, but in Woodside, like Palo Alto, our budget was unlikely to get us anything other than a tiny cottage. We bid on a few homes in Woodside and Portola Valley, and were consistently outbid. This was nothing new to us. When we first started trying to buy a home in San Francisco in 2001, we bid on 35 houses and were outbid every single time (despite the fact that we always bid over asking price).
The Viewing
One day, my husband talked me into looking at a house in a small town about halfway between San Francisco and Palo Alto. I wasn’t interested at all in the town, which had a reputation for, well, snootiness. But there happened to be a home there in our price range (well, almost in our price range). It had already been on the market for three weeks, which is a long time to be on the market in the Bay Area. We saw the house the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was bleak and rainy, and when we arrived we realized that the driveway was so steep, we’d have to park at the top. I didn’t even get out of the car. I was certain I had no interest in this house, which was over budget and kind of scary. My husband took a look. He liked it, but said it had some issues. He made me promise to come back and look if the price was reduced.
Long story short, the price was reduced that week, and we went to see the house on Thanksgiving weekend. I walked down the steep driveway and into the house. It was completely empty, without a stitch of furniture. It was freezing. The floor of the entryway was a hideous red perma-brick. The lighting fixtures were straight out of 1972. But all of that was beside the point. Because there, in front of my eyes, was an amazing view. From the road, the house looked like a dull one-story rancher, but once inside, you were faced with a wall of windows looking out onto luscious green canyon. A narrow deck ran the length of the house. In the distance was a sliver of the bay.
Wandering the main floor, I saw that every room had huge windows overlooking the canyon. The two upstairs bathrooms were big but in horrible shape, complete with pink and green tile and carpeting. But we’d seen a lot of horrific bathrooms in our house hunting over the years; and in our price range, we weren’t going to find a house without issues. The kitchen had been recently remodeled and was a big improvement over the tiny kitchen in our city house. The trees flanking the driveway above the house looked like a lush forest compared to the single tree planted in front of our house in the avenues, where every tree required a permit from the city.
Then we went downstairs. The family room downstairs, which shared the footprint of the living room above it, also had walls of windows. Just off the family room was the revelation: the home office. It had a wall of built-in shelves, was generously sized, and yes, there were windows. I make my living as a writer, and have had a variety of home offices over the years. In the city, we’d converted a tiny “bedroom” (although I can’t imagine fitting a bed in there) into my home office. In our first house in Daly City, we’d converted an unfinished basement into a cozy, very functioning home office. In our first apartment in the Castro, my office had been a closet.
Here was the home office of my dreams: private, spacious, with a whole wall for books and beautiful natural light.
We took a trek down to the back yard. And I do mean trek. The steps down to the yard were in terrible shape, the fence falling apart. The yard was taken up by a big kidney-sized pool. Big minus. Although the drought wasn’t upon us yet, I still worried about water usage, although the realtor assured us you could cut back on evaporation almost entirely just by keeping the pool covered year round. The siding was falling away from the pool, leaving huge chunks of concrete exposed. Still, the yard was secluded, surrounded on all sides by trees. I imagined our family spending summers by the pool, in this green oasis. It was so different from life in the city. I could picture it.
The Decision
There are two things I prize in a home: views and privacy. This home had both in spades. It was 3500 square feet and change, more than twice the size of our 1250-square foot home in the city. While we’d never wanted a big house, as there are only three of us, the fact was that this house was comparable in price to many smaller houses we’d seen, fixer-uppers on tiny lots with front windows look directly onto congested neighborhood streets. In this house, we wouldn’t have to deal with massive SUVs blocking our driveway, or with the car horns and blaring radios that we so often heard in our city house.
After looking at the house, we drove to the small local school. It was a beautiful campus tucked into a hill, surrounded by trees. Our son ran around the large playground ecstatically. On the way home, we visited my in-laws, who lived ten minutes away in a neighboring town, in the house where my husband grew up. I loved the idea of living so close to them.
That night, we made our decision. It would be a stretch, we knew, and it would make things difficult for a while. But we also felt it was a fairly safe purchase, as houses go: low inventory, high demand, top-ranked schools, etc, along with an asking price well below most houses in the town.
We were one of four potential buyers to bid on the house that day. We were given the option to counter, and we did. A couple of days later, we got the call: the house was ours.
We were elated and terrified. We instantly put our city house on the market and sold it within two weeks for $40,00o less than we paid for it. But we knew that we were taking advantage of a relative lull in the market, and we were getting a good deal on the canyon house.
We moved in with our old furniture, which was far from adequate for the space. Our single furniture purchase was a king-sized bed for the master bedroom. That first night, sleeping in the bed, I was comfortable (I’d never had a king-sized bed before) and filled with anxiety about our major purchase. My writing income has always been up and down, and now, we’d put ourselves in a position where we needed my writing income hold steady for a while. I immediately started lining up teaching and freelance writing gigs to supplement my advances and royalties. Days after we moved in, I taught a one-day writing workshop in our cobbled together living room, and was interrupted halfway through by a neighbor across the canyon who said our pool filter was making too much noise.
We had someone come to look at the filter later that week, which was when we discovered that pool equals money pit. Which, of course, any intelligent person should already know. But hey, live and learn.
Fast forward
That was seven years ago. In the time since, the home has, fortunately, appreciated as we hoped it would. The man across the canyon who complained about our pool filter turned out to be the real noise offender, spending summer days sanding his deck with an electric sander for hours on end. Also, he, or someone in his house, plays drums. Want to know how drums echo across a canyon? Come visit us!
But we’ve gotten used to the sanding, and the drums. We’ve also gotten used to the noise of airplanes. That sliver of a view of the bay also comes with a view of airplanes landing in the distance. I remember our first night in the house, cuddling in the king-sized bed with our little boy, watching the airplanes come in. The sight of the airplanes was so exciting, it seemed to ease some of his anxiety about moving.
While the house has a long way to go, we still have that canyon view that sold me on the house the very first time I saw it. The view still does our hearts good, every single day.
When we moved in, we thought we would stay until our son graduated elementary school, and then maybe love back to the city. But my husband is still working in Palo Alto, and the city, much to my surprise, seems less appealing than it once did. For one thing, we have a community here, and our son’s friends are an important part of his life. We’ve gotten used to the peacefulness of our home. And yes, we’ve gotten used to the view. I’ve become extremely fond of my home office. To top it off, our foggy neighborhood in the Outer Richmond isn’t nearly as foggy anymore, thanks to global warming. Fog may sound like a strange selling point, but I actually love the smell and feel of the fog. Without it, our old neighborhood feels less special, more bleak.
As of this writing, we’ve been living in and loving our canyon house for seven years. Our son has gone from Kindergarten in our wonderful, local public school to middle school. I’ve worked steadily along, writing and publishing. California has been through a major drought, which appears to be subsiding after the massive storms that swelled the creek at the bottom of our property and felled hundreds of trees in the Bay Area, including a massive one that fell in our side yard and lucky missed the house and any roaming children.
This house that once felt like a safe if daunting investment now feels like home. It is a work-in-progress. I don’t want to leave. On this blog, I’ll continue to chronicle our efforts to make it a little bit better, one paint chip at a time. I’ll be chronicling our continued efforts to improve upon a good thing. You’ll find posts on design, minimalism (a goal at which I constantly try and constantly fail), and Northern California living.
Thank you for visiting our our canyon house! I hope you’ll stay and have a look around.