Z/Web

Was up in Oregon this past week for a quick visit and some house shopping, as I’m toying with the idea of moving up there. I got to test out my new Nikon D70 digital SLR and got some terrific pictures, if I do say so myself. I’ve put together some picture galleries if you’d like to see some of the photos.

Went house shopping in Oregon today.

First, some history. I’ve been living in Scotts Valley, California in a tiny 450 square foot trailer which I bought in 1996. It’s a small mobile home park where I don’t own the land but pay rent for my space. It’s ridiculously cheap living for the Bay Area, but the trailer is very small and it’s gotten smaller when I began working from home and spending 24-7 there. This summer when I checked with a company about upgrading to a larger home (which turned out to be California-style expensive), they countered by offering to buy my home. They would replace my trailer with a large double-wide and resell the property for three times what they were offering me. The amount for my trailer was about four times what I paid and got me thinking, so I called up my Uncle Phil who’s a Realtor in Oregon. A few minutes of checking showed there were many properties up there in my price range. While in California my old home would barely qualify me for the down payment on a dog house, in Oregon it could buy me a three bedroom home. Since I went to high school in Oregon and love the area, the idea of moving back up there was appealing. Though I love this area, California is an expensive place to live, and all I really need is a broadband Internet connection to do my businesses.

My original plan was to move next summer. Since I was visiting Oregon this fall, I’d look at some places just to get a feel for what my money could buy up there. We started that process today. The very first home showed promise: nice size, good neighborhood, decent area, but it needed some improvements to be move-in ready and I felt the highway going through town (Forest Grove) was too trafficky. The houses we looked at were impressive, but of course each had a few drawbacks. Either the price was steep, the location awkward, the layout of the house wrong, or the condition was poor. In the afternoon we headed down toward McMinnville, a university town about halfway between Portland and Salem. Just a few miles north is the little town (3K people) of Lafayette. It’s a cute little town with one main street (the highway). I immediately liked the area, which is wine country with vineyards everywhere, similar to where I am now in the Santa Cruz mountains. Here we found a huge home (1800 sq. ft.) at a terrific price. On paper it sounded great so I was skeptical, but when we saw the corner lot it looked great with a nice yard. Inside, it was all on one level, ranch-style, with a huge great room with vaulted ceiling, wonderful kitchen with tons of cabinets and built-ins, and everything else I could want. It even had a fenced-in back yard and detached two-car garage. I could find very little I didn’t like, especially at the price. Then my uncle revealed it was a manufactured home. I was astonished: it appeared to be a normal house, though it did have siding. But unlike my trailer, this was not a mobile home: it just meant it was built off-site and assembled at this location. It also was not above ground but on its own concrete foundation. So it’s really a normal house just pre-built.

We continued looking, but I kept coming back to that house. It was huge, giving me the space I crave. It had all the features I wanted. The location was excellent, the price superb. I hadn’t plan to move now, but when I thought about it, the timing was right: I had the next issue of the magazine to do in October, during escrow, and if we closed early enough, I could move in November and be ready to resume business as usual in December. It would be tight but was theoretically feasible. And since I had already seen the difficulty of finding a home with all the features I wanted at a good price, I figured waiting would probably mean I’d end up having to compromise. Why not do it now and get the home I really wanted?