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 reluctantly 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), eventually purchasing our first home in Daly City. So we weren’t surprised by the outbidding, but it does begin to wear on you after a while. It got to a point where we probably bid on houses we shouldn’t have, because it seemed so unlikely we would ever win a bid. Anyone who has gone through the house-hunting process in the Bay Area is probably familiar with this feeling.
Next: Finding the Canyon House