In the mean time we are still living our minimalist existence in our apartment in Santa Clara. We decided to put up a Christmas tree quite early this year (December 2nd) to try and make it feel festive and more homely. Unfortunately the Christmas tree lasted 2 days before Toby decided to climb in it and get himself caught up in the lights! We no longer have a Christmas tree up in our living room!!

We haven’t decided what we are going to do for Christmas this year yet. Because of the timing this year Jasper will get two 3 day weekends so hopefully we’ll do a bit more exploring and go on some random drives. Other than that I expect it will be a quiet one, just the two of us. Hopefully next year we’ll be in our own house and we will have some visitors!

I have been studying lots this week as I have my last assignment of the year due in next Wednesday. I also get the results of my last two courses on Friday so a big Uni week next week. I also need to decide whether to take my final course concurrently with the one I am studying at the moment or not, if I want to I will have to register by 22nd December so not a lot of time to decide.

I am glad I’ve not been in the UK for the past few weeks, the weather there has been insane almost the entire country was covered in snow last week. It’s insane we never normally get snow this time of year. Not only has it been super cold and snowy but the whole economic and political situation seems to be ridiculous. So many people are out of work, more and more people are being made redundant each day. Students are protesting in London and rioting which is insanity, I thought students were meant to be all about the peaceful protest. I understand they want to make a point but those people acting like idiots are not going to help their cause.

It’s a funny time of year for us Potts’ as this week marks a year since my father-in-law lost his battle with cancer. Being away from family at Christmas and not settled in a new home yet has been difficult enough but also dealing with a time where having family close would be helpful has been tough. Definitely really missed Jay lots this year, there have been so many times that we have seen something and wanted to tell him about it or we have made plans and wanted to share them with him. It’s so tough dealing with losing someone, we knew for a while that it was likely to happen we knew there was a chance that all the chemo and surgery wouldn’t stop the cancer but when it happened, when his body couldn’t fight it anymore it was just heart breaking and living without him in our lives has been so difficult. I don’t think any of us have reached a point yet where we can’t just cry at the thought of knowing he’s not here anymore but I think we’re all coping a lot better.

At this time of year it’s not just tough because of missing Jay but also being so far away from the grandparents, parents and siblings, I miss everyone.

I can’t quite believe that in 2 months time I am going to become an Auntie, my brother and his soon to be wife are due to have a little boy at the beginning of February 2011. I am so excited but also a bit gutted that we are so far away from each other. I can’t wait to have a nephew, I just hope we will be able to see him as much as we can.

No other exciting news from the Potts house, just waiting and hoping that the house happens and this time next year we’ll be celebrating Christmas in our own home with our cats and some family. Also looking forward to meeting the new MacKenzie addition in 2011.

Peaceful protests and love peeps

xxx

So we have been camping in our apartment with very minimal furniture and clothing for 5 months, and we spent a month living out of suitcases at my folks place before coming out here.

As you can imagine it’s getting a little tedious now and we are at the point of having to make a tough decision on whether we pay the extortionate amount to have our things delivered to our current apartment, to find a bigger more accessible  place to move to month-month or to keep camping and hope we find a house to buy soon.

It’s a tough decision and one we need to think on for a little longer, but I just keep hoping a decent house will come on the market soon.

Jasper has been promoted since we moved out and has been working his arse off. He produced some fab demos for JavaOne which people were very impressed with. He is currently in Antwerp presenting some talks at Devoxx, so I am all alone in the US at the moment.

I have made friends with some other Bay Area Brits through facebook and have met up with one of the ladies a couple of times recently, she is lovely and it feels nice to know that I am starting to settle and have a social life again!

Jasper is due back at the end of the week and unsurprisingly we’re planning on going to a couple of open houses this weekend.

I have an assignment due in next week which I am working on today trying to get all of my reading done by Thursday and will start writing it on Friday and finish it off Monday/Tuesday. It’s quite nice that I am only studying one module at the moment, I need to make the decision by December as to whether I want to study a 2nd level 3 course from January though or if I should stretch my degree out by another year. To be honest I would really like to just get it finished, but it means finding the money to pay for the course now and means that I can’t get a job until the summer.

Seems like we have lots of decisions to make at the moment, I guess it’s a case of prioritising whether we want to push through knowing we can come out the other side in a year with a house and a degree, or whether we take our time and hope that we can at least pull off one or the other.

First things first though, Jasper needs to get back from Europe and I need to do this assignment, we’ll deal with the big stuff next week!

Other than the annoyance of loosing out on houses and having to camp out in the apartment things are going pretty well, we’re making friends settling back in to the area and Jasper’s job is going really well, so can’t complain really.

Peace and love peeps

xxx

We spent about 4 or so hours at the house this week having inspections carried out for termite work, a general home inspection and a geotechnical on the footings and hillside.

The geotech guy said there were some big issues with the fact that the house was built on a previous landslide and that this hill could move again in the future. Also the hill behind the house had issues with previous mudslides and looked like it could have more. The big issue of the mudslides could be solved by putting in a V shaped retaining wall, but this was likely to cost around $80k!!!!!

Other than the geotech issues the termite report came back with over $14k worth of work to do immediately as well as a couple of big jobs that they couldn’t quote for without further inspection and these were likely to cost over $5k each!!!

All of this was on top of the house needing a new roof $10k, new bathrooms and if we wanted to put a driveway in that would be another $100k!!!!

Basically the house was a money pit and unless we had quarter of a million dollars lying around would never have been a viable option.

Absolutely gutted that it had so many issues, we both loved the house and the idea of the lifestyle but there was no way we could take on so many problems or the risks involved in losing either our half a million investment or our lives!

So back to the drawing board, yet again!

We will just have to see if there are any other options available to us, if not we will have to have our stuff delivered to our small apartment and somehow have to deal with unpacking and repacking everything.

The hunt continues!

Peace and love

xxx

We looked at houses out by the our friends place in Manteca and ridiculously we could buy a huge house for half the amount in the south bay, but Jasper would have an hour and a half commute each way and we’d have to cope with 45+ degrees heat in the summer. Neither of which appealed.

We then took a look at houses for sale in the Los Gatos and Santa Cruz mountains to the south. We discovered there were quite a few houses we could afford, and a lot that we could easily afford. The problem with the cheap ones is that the commute would be similar to Manteca but down long windy narrow mountain roads. So we needed to look at any in our budget that were a decent distance from the 17.

We found two houses which were interesting, one was about 55 minutes commute to work without traffic, it had 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a lovely living space, but it was on a very small 4,000 sqf plot with views in to the neighbours houses. The idea of living in the mountains is to feel relatively remote and having views of the redwoods or if you’re lucky far reaching view over the mountains. So that house was also ruled out.

The 2nd house however looked very cool from the photos and it had an open house on a Sunday afternoon, so we thought we should drive out and take a look. We met one of the owners and the agent and the owners lovely dog and took the tour. The house was lovely and we both thought it was much more ‘us’ than any of the bog standard bungalows we have been looking at nearer the bay.

We decided to ask for more information from the agent the following week and did a practice run on the commute. At peak rush hour it was 45 minutes door to door. Jasper spoke to his boss to see if his hours could be more flexible and she agreed. So we made an appointment for our realtors to come with us to view the house a second time.

We had been tossing up between putting an offer in on the mountain house and a bungalow in Santa Clara, so wanted to take a thorough look around to see if the commute would really be worth it to live there.

We spent about 40 minutes at the house chatting with the owners and getting all the information we needed. It was raining for both of our viewings and yet both times we loved it. And if you love a place when it’s all dark, wet and grey outside then imagine how amazing it must be in the sunshine!

The current owners are lovely people and have obviously put a lot of love in to the house.

So we had a think over the weekend and decided to put in an offer, this was countered the following day and after a bit of negotiation we reached a happy figure for all of us. We signed the paperwork this evening and now have 14 days to get inspections done. Our only big concern on the house is that there may be some big bills for section one repair work, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. As long as there isn’t anything too major we should be moving in before Christmas, which will be amazing.

We’re really lucky to have found a big funky house in a great location, lets just hope we can afford to take on the work.

The nice thing about the situation of the house is that it’s less than 5 minutes to the 17, it’s 10 mins to the local town and 20 minutes to Los Gatos. Although it’s relatively remote it’s on a private road with 5 or 6 other houses and although you can’t see your neighbours from the house, you know there are other people around and therefore it doesn’t feel quite so lonely.

Anyway, fingers crossed inspections come back OK and then we will be homeowners once again by the end of the year.

I’ll keep y’all posted!

Peace and love

Fi

xxx

We waited for the paperwork, but when it finally came through they were asking for the extra 10k to be in cash! They would not accept us financing it, presumably because they knew it would not appraise for more than the $510k we had originally offered. We checked, checked and checked again but there was no way we could re-jig our finances to be able to come up with the extra money. We went back to them with our only options and they wouldn’t accept. So reluctantly yesterday we cancelled our offer and they placed the house back on the market. Gutted!

We have gone through all of the other options, houses in our price range in all of the areas we like and don’t like. As fun as living in the mountains sounds, the risk of earthquake landslip and mountain lions and coyotes eating the cats kind of out ways it. We know the areas we like and we don’t want to compromise on area or commute time.

So that leaves us with two options …

Buy a house that is in our price range in the areas we feel comfortable with, that requires compromise on size of house, size of plot etc.

Or rent a house for. The problem with this option is that most house rentals in the bay area are based on a one year lease. If we tie ourselves in to a one year lease we won’t be able to seriously look at houses again until next summer, by which time who knows what will have happened to the market and mortgage rates. It also means the prospect of moving twice in 12 months and I have really had enough of moving!!!

The best option seems to be the compromise house option, after all Kirsty and Phil are always banging on about the fact you can’t get exactly what you want and there is always a compromise somewhere.

We have a house in mind, one that we considered whilst waiting on Kenwood, but Kenwood was too good a house to not at least try for. The house we are considering is a regular sale, so we wouldn’t have to wait more than a day for an answer on any offer we put in. It is in much better condition than Kenwood. It has a decent amount of living space and a huge lot, bigger than Kenwood. There are however two big compromises, 1. there are only 2 bedrooms, which would mean future building work to extend or convert. And 2. it is on a busy street, it’s a 2 lane each way main road, with a decent amount of traffic throughout the whole day. The house is on a corner though and we think we can see a good way of making an entrance on the side street and fencing/hedging off the front of the house in order to reduce road noise and make it feel more private.

We are going to view the house again with our realtors in the next couple of days and will see if we want to put an offer in and whether we really can compromise on that road. Oh the other decent thing about the house is we think we can get it for about $40k less than Kenwood!!! Which would make a nice difference both on our monthly payments and in terms of being able to do a small amount of work with the capital we have left.

Anyway, that’s the update for now. Who knows what will happen this week, but fingers crossed we won’t be living in an empty apartment at Christmas!

Peace and love peeps.

Fi

xxx