Part I Installment 1
TOO MUCH MONEY
Our problem was money. Not too little—too much. But don’t roll your eyes in disgust just yet; as you’ll soon find out, we weren’t really rich to begin with, and we sure didn’t stay rich for long. The year was 2005, my wife and I were both working, and we were living in a small live-work apartment I’d built with sweat equity. We had a modest mortgage payment of $460 per month, as well as a tenant whose rent fully covered the mortgage and then some. My wife, Aidong Ni, is from mainland China, and I come from German immigrant parents, so both of us were imbued with the compulsion to save, save, save. Five years into our marriage, with both of us working, we were amazed to find that our bank account had swollen to more than a hundred thousand dollars.
In those halcyon pre-Great Recession days, having a lot of money in the bank was considered stupid. Instead of saving money, you were supposed to invest it, so it would grow into even more money. Then you’d invest that money and grow it into yet more money, and then—you get the idea. I never really understood the point of using all that money just to grow yet more money, but then architects aren’t known for their business acumen. As the old joke goes: An architect wins a million dollars in the lottery. A reporter asks him, “Now that you’re a millionaire, what are you going to do?” The architect replies, “Oh, I’ll just keep practicing architecture until it’s all gone.”
Still, my wife and I agreed that we should do something with our huge nest egg—that it was no use having it just sitting there in a savings account drawings a few percent interest. We’d also just had a baby, so our live-work space, which was less than eight hundred square feet, was starting to feel a little tight. The obvious thing to do, it seemed, was invest that money in an actual house. And since I’m an architect and a do-it-yourselfer who’s always up for a building project, the ideal house would be one needing some sweat equity—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.
We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the United States, but I started checking the local real estate listings for houses we thought we could afford. Most were in Oakland and Berkeley, on the opposite side of the bay from astronomically expensive San Francisco. I grew up in a circa-1929 cottage in Concord, California, a small town even further inland, so I had a soft spot for homes of that era. Having also spent my late teens and early twenties in an Oakland house built in 1966, I realized that I had an outright aversion to homes of that era, with their tawdry Sheetrock walls and flimsy aluminum windows. Every time we toured an open house from that period, I simply couldn’t imagine us living there. Those places just creeped me out.
By contrast, whenever we stepped into a home built in the 1920s, I felt like I’d returned to my childhood: the doors with their recessed panels, the glass doorknobs resembling giant jewels, the top-nailed hardwood floors with their skinny planks, even the kludgy old double-hung windows—it all felt endearingly like the house I grew up in.
Lucky for me, my wife, having grown up in the People’s Republic of China—probably the closest thing there is to another planet—had none of the experiential baggage I carried. Moreover, since I was an architect and presumably knew best, she was more than willing to let me choose which house would be right for us.
In November 2005, after a few months of scanning the real estate listings, we found a house in the Berkeley hills that seemed within our price range. It was on Cragmont Avenue, a mile or so north of the University of California, in a neighborhood of wildly varying Period Revival homes styles strung along picturesque winding streets. Once again, I’ll point out that the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the whole United States, so the asking price may still shock you all these years later: $625,000. Even more shocking, though, is what was being offered for that amount: a tiny cottage that had reputedly housed the gardener working for the folks in the “big house” next door.
Even calling the place a “house” was a stretch; it was, in fact, just one big, vaulted room with a few ancillary bits tacked onto the back—about six hundred square feet in total. There was no central heating; the whole place was purportedly kept warm by a small electric wall heater built into one corner of the living room. There was an interesting spiral staircase leading up to a sort of little mezzanine, and the exterior was charmingly Storybook-ish, but that was about all the place had going for it.
Still, as the talented and creative architect I fancied myself to be, I was sure I could turn this little hovel into something worth having. After talking it over with my wife, I contacted a real estate broker friend named Monica Wong and asked her to make an offer on the place. Now, “offer” usually presupposes you’re offering less money than the asking price. But at that time, in the blistering-hot Bay Area real estate market, practically no one dared to do that. On the contrary, it was quite normal for buyers to get into bidding wars and pay ten, fifteen, or twenty percent above the asking price. In one of my rare instances of common sense, I refused to play this game, since it was something of an oddball property, and since the asking price seemed pretty ambitious to begin with. In any event, the seller’s representative accepted our offer, which met their price of $625,000. We were on our way.
The disclosure documents had noted some kind of unusual arrangement relating to a small yard at the very back of the lot, which the owner of the adjoining property had apparently taken over as part of her own garden. Obviously, if we were buying the house, she would have to vacate this land, so we were compelled to meet our future neighbor and discuss it. She was a friendly older lady named Selma Klett, whose late husband had been—what else—an architect. Her house, which he’d designed, was a very interesting example of the 1960s-era California architectural style known as Brown Shingle Revival.
Selma was a perfectly nice person, and as we sat in her living room making small talk, there didn’t seem to be any issue with her relinquishing the little piece of land she’d been borrowing. She was also smitten with our infant son Robert, who was a bit over four months old at the time, and told us she had an interesting old wicker rocking goose she’d like to give him. Before we got up to go, Selma casually asked if I knew about the culverted creek running down her driveway, which struck me as an odd question, but which I didn’t really think much about until later. Then I thought about it a lot.
Next time: The half-million-dollar hovel.
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| Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash |
Our problem was money. Not too little—too much. But don’t roll your eyes in disgust just yet; as you’ll soon find out, we weren’t really rich to begin with, and we sure didn’t stay rich for long. The year was 2005, my wife and I were both working, and we were living in a small live-work apartment I’d built with sweat equity. We had a modest mortgage payment of $460 per month, as well as a tenant whose rent fully covered the mortgage and then some. My wife, Aidong Ni, is from mainland China, and I come from German immigrant parents, so both of us were imbued with the compulsion to save, save, save. Five years into our marriage, with both of us working, we were amazed to find that our bank account had swollen to more than a hundred thousand dollars.
In those halcyon pre-Great Recession days, having a lot of money in the bank was considered stupid. Instead of saving money, you were supposed to invest it, so it would grow into even more money. Then you’d invest that money and grow it into yet more money, and then—you get the idea. I never really understood the point of using all that money just to grow yet more money, but then architects aren’t known for their business acumen. As the old joke goes: An architect wins a million dollars in the lottery. A reporter asks him, “Now that you’re a millionaire, what are you going to do?” The architect replies, “Oh, I’ll just keep practicing architecture until it’s all gone.”
Still, my wife and I agreed that we should do something with our huge nest egg—that it was no use having it just sitting there in a savings account drawings a few percent interest. We’d also just had a baby, so our live-work space, which was less than eight hundred square feet, was starting to feel a little tight. The obvious thing to do, it seemed, was invest that money in an actual house. And since I’m an architect and a do-it-yourselfer who’s always up for a building project, the ideal house would be one needing some sweat equity—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.
We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the United States, but I started checking the local real estate listings for houses we thought we could afford. Most were in Oakland and Berkeley, on the opposite side of the bay from astronomically expensive San Francisco. I grew up in a circa-1929 cottage in Concord, California, a small town even further inland, so I had a soft spot for homes of that era. Having also spent my late teens and early twenties in an Oakland house built in 1966, I realized that I had an outright aversion to homes of that era, with their tawdry Sheetrock walls and flimsy aluminum windows. Every time we toured an open house from that period, I simply couldn’t imagine us living there. Those places just creeped me out.
By contrast, whenever we stepped into a home built in the 1920s, I felt like I’d returned to my childhood: the doors with their recessed panels, the glass doorknobs resembling giant jewels, the top-nailed hardwood floors with their skinny planks, even the kludgy old double-hung windows—it all felt endearingly like the house I grew up in.
Lucky for me, my wife, having grown up in the People’s Republic of China—probably the closest thing there is to another planet—had none of the experiential baggage I carried. Moreover, since I was an architect and presumably knew best, she was more than willing to let me choose which house would be right for us.
 |
| The realtor's sales card for the tiny cottage we were in contract to buy for $695,000. It was basically one room with a kitchen tacked onto the back, and a small loft reached by the spiral staircase visibile in the picture at right. |
Even calling the place a “house” was a stretch; it was, in fact, just one big, vaulted room with a few ancillary bits tacked onto the back—about six hundred square feet in total. There was no central heating; the whole place was purportedly kept warm by a small electric wall heater built into one corner of the living room. There was an interesting spiral staircase leading up to a sort of little mezzanine, and the exterior was charmingly Storybook-ish, but that was about all the place had going for it.
Still, as the talented and creative architect I fancied myself to be, I was sure I could turn this little hovel into something worth having. After talking it over with my wife, I contacted a real estate broker friend named Monica Wong and asked her to make an offer on the place. Now, “offer” usually presupposes you’re offering less money than the asking price. But at that time, in the blistering-hot Bay Area real estate market, practically no one dared to do that. On the contrary, it was quite normal for buyers to get into bidding wars and pay ten, fifteen, or twenty percent above the asking price. In one of my rare instances of common sense, I refused to play this game, since it was something of an oddball property, and since the asking price seemed pretty ambitious to begin with. In any event, the seller’s representative accepted our offer, which met their price of $625,000. We were on our way.
The disclosure documents had noted some kind of unusual arrangement relating to a small yard at the very back of the lot, which the owner of the adjoining property had apparently taken over as part of her own garden. Obviously, if we were buying the house, she would have to vacate this land, so we were compelled to meet our future neighbor and discuss it. She was a friendly older lady named Selma Klett, whose late husband had been—what else—an architect. Her house, which he’d designed, was a very interesting example of the 1960s-era California architectural style known as Brown Shingle Revival.
Selma was a perfectly nice person, and as we sat in her living room making small talk, there didn’t seem to be any issue with her relinquishing the little piece of land she’d been borrowing. She was also smitten with our infant son Robert, who was a bit over four months old at the time, and told us she had an interesting old wicker rocking goose she’d like to give him. Before we got up to go, Selma casually asked if I knew about the culverted creek running down her driveway, which struck me as an odd question, but which I didn’t really think much about until later. Then I thought about it a lot.
Next time: The half-million-dollar hovel.
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