deeplyshallow // home sweet

home sweet

After a nightmare couple of weeks at work, Susan finagled a couple of days off and escaped here for a visit. When she returns (tonight), it will be to begin the process of extricating herself from her job, which has finally gone over the line. Rather than burning herself out until two weeks before our wedding in November, she’s going to spend the next two or three months recuperating (because even more than I’d like to not marry a frazzled bundle of stress and nerves, she’d prefer not to be one). Lazy mornings, Law & Order marathons, no more sixteen-hour days, etc. These couple of days off aren’t quite as relaxed as they might otherwise be; her mind is preoccupied with returning to work midweek and giving her resignation to her prickly, condescending employer.

I’ve been trying to take her mind off of things, with only moderate success. But on Sunday afternoon, after a drive into San Luis Obispo for an early lunch, this took care of itself. We returned to find my street speckled with signs advertising an open house. The last time we did this, we weren’t at all tempted by our findings; this time, however, was a different story. For one, the house is just across the street and one down from where I currently live, and we both definitely like it here. For another, it’s basically the perfect first home: eleven hundred square feet of smallness, so well-organized that its size would probably not be an issue for many years.

There’s only one thing standing in our way, and that’s this: Morro Bay is too pricey for us. The home was listed for $644,000, which is easily twice what we’d like to spend on our first home. A quick check on Zillow reveals that the home might be worth about twenty grand more.

But man, it’s a nice little place. I’m not fond of the desert-style front yard, which is a bricked-off square populated with succulents on a white rock bed, but the backyard is marvelous, expanding the idea into a stair-stepped, surprisingly wide environment that contains a fire pit, walking paths, etc. In the backyard is what appeared to be a storage shed, but, judging from the windows/blinds/etc., is more likely an insulated external workspace. I once read that Russell Banks kept an office at the back of his property, and would walk through a small woods and cross a creek to get to it; this wouldn’t be quite the same, but it would be isolated enough for a writing space.

The house was full of windows, one thing I immediately loved. The daylight here is always bright and cool, and the house across the street was soaked in it. There were hardwood floors in the master bedroom, which had an adjoining office that overlooked the backyard, and scattered throughout the house were exits and small nooks that Susan cooed at. The living room had a respectable view of Morro Rock, and the sell sheets advertised terrific views if you ever decided to build an additional story.

Still: six hundred fifty grand is just stupid. There’s an ugly lot on this street that features a ramshackle house; its “tear-down potential” is what keeps the asking price at almost a half-million dollars.

The realtor stood in the living room like a wooden cigar-shop Indian, tracking us with her eyes as we wandered. When we finally reemerged into the living room, she squeezed her already squinty eyes with her cheeks in what I took to be a smile, although I could have been wrong. She took one look at us and said, “I know, huh.” She was right, it was a wonderful little home. But probably not for us. She gave it her best shot: “Most people think it’s too expensive, but I remember my first home, and my friends’ first homes, and you really just have to dive in. The leap’s never so bad once you make it. And come on, the first ten years are just interest payments. The writeoffs make it an easy decison.” We thanked her and left, and Susan sighed. I could practically see her calculating my new salary against the cost of the house — if she threw my entire pre-tax income at it, then, assuming there were no such thing as interest, it would take ten years to pay it off. Since that’s impossible, it’s clear that we’ll be throwing our money at rent, not ownership, at least until I sell that first book. Of course, I really need a good writing space to finish it. Maybe under cover of night I can sneak into that external office across the street and stealthily work on the book. The neighborhood could use a ninja novelist to spice things up a little.

I am reading the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s global-warming trilogy (the man seems capable of telling a story only if he can drag it out across three books, when one somewhat thick one would do just fine). If his position, which some might call ‘alarmist’, is correct, then in a couple of years we won’t have to worry about our housing dilemma. We’ll be chasing elk across the icy plains of the Mojave in our beaver-skin moccasins, hurling ineffective snowballs at them and begging them to stop for a second and be our dinner.