Fate?

Do you believe in fate?

I wasn't completely honest in my last entry. I have been very lucky in always having an interesting and unique place to live. Given that I work from home, my home environment is important to me.

For as long as I can remember I have had an interest in Mid Century Modern architecture. That style describes forward-looking, open, minimalist designs from the late 40, 50s, and 60s. There's even an online message board for people like me: Lotta Living. Unfortunately, there aren't very many condo complexes in that style -- at least not around here in my price range. There are, however a couple of tracts of reasonably-priced (Ha! I can't believe I call $600,000 "reasonably-priced) single family homes. Below is an example of one:


The Fate Part

On Friday, a happen to see a listing for a house that I hadn't seen before, which was very peculiar since it had been on the market for a month. Even those of you not terribly familiar with real estate will know that a house on the market for over a month, under $1,000,000 is very rare in Orange County.

I met a good friend of mine, Erica Yamaguchi (she's a real estate agent too) for lunch. I was talking about the new listing and she casually mentioned that it looked vacant and she had her lockbox key on her...in we went.

So it turns out there's a place that affordable for me (barely -- and I'll talk about that later), has some unique architectural style, good location, and it appears that very few people can see the potential in the property but me. Is it fate? I try very hard to remain objective and not make an emotional decision, but it's really tough.

All weekend long I've been preoccupied with..the House. I can't keep my mind off it. As a counter-measure, I've been trying to think of all the objective ways to evaluate the property: Is it in a good location for long-term value appreciation? Is it a flexible property that could be rented out at a later date? Can space be added? I think I'm going crazy!

Stephen