When we began making plans to get married, we expected that Mark would keep his apartment until the end of October; he would be officially homeless while he was in Hawaii for the three days of November before the wedding, and finally we'd move him into Cheryl's condo when we returned from our honeymoon. Looking back, we don't know how we thought we'd have managed to squeeze both of us into that little condo unit, or to get set for a move in the middle of preparing for our wedding; fortunately, Cheryl had begun looking at houses in Spring 2001, and in April she found a good one!
Specifically, she found the house on Thursday, 19 April; she was driving by to look at another house she had found in the listings, and she spotted this one by serendipity. It looked so nice that she doubted we could afford it, and she wasn't even going to write down the selling agent's phone number; but she did, and called, and was pleasantly surprised by the asking price. Mark was in Berkeley, so when we talked that evening she said "I think I've found our house!" Mark was returning on Friday afternoon, then we had a concert with the Torrance Civic Chorale on Saturday night (during which we sang a part of "All I Ask of You" from "The Phantom of the Opera" as a duet, which was the song Mark sang to her when he proposed, but that's another story), and then Mark had to leave on another business trip Sunday; so we made arrangements to tour the house on Saturday with Phyllis Brice, the agent who helped Cheryl buy her condo unit (and has since helped her sell it). We liked the house so much that we wrote up an offer right then in the back of Mark's van (that's Phyllis with Cheryl in the picture above); Phyllis delivered it to the seller's agent on Sunday at the start of the open house, and it was accepted a few days later! Less than a week from finding it to committing to buy it... Well, that's the Southern California housing market for you!
What with the hot refinance market keeping lenders busy, plus some additional delays due to the sellers, we finally closed two months later, on 25 June 2001. This is the first photo we took of the house; we were kind of hesitant to tempt fate by photographing it before we had closed on it, taken possession, and re-keyed the locks! It's a two-story house with attached two-car garage, four bedrooms, and two and a half baths; it's the front house of two on the lot, so technically it's a townhouse, but we do not share a wall with the back-door neighbors.
Cheryl's car is a Saturn, and at some Saturn dealers there's a tradition of taking a photo of the handoff of keys from the salesperson to a first-time buyer. Since this was the first house either of us had ever bought, Mark took a picture to document the moment that the locksmith gave the new keys to Cheryl!
The impression that both of us had when we looked at the house on 21 April 2001 was that it was very well-lit and open-feeling inside; in fact, we want to figure out what the Hawaiian for "House of Light" is (Hale A'o?) so we can call our new home by that name! Here is Cheryl in the living room, sitting on one of the two fireplaces (there's another directly above in the master bedroom; both had natural gas fittings, and a few months later we installed gas logs like the one Cheryl had at her condo). Light walls, light wood, light carpet, and many windows all give a wonderful feel to every room in the house.
A large part of the open feel of the middle of the house comes from the stairwell shown here, which has a skylight at the top. No matter from which direction the sun is shining at any time, you don't need artificial lights in any room during the day!
And here's the kitchen, or at least a portion of it; our digital camera doesn't zoom very wide... All these photos were taken on the day we took possession of the house, as you can tell from the neglected lawn and the empty interior. Mark's apartment lease ran out at the end of July and he hoped not to have to start paying month-to-month rent, so in quick succession we had the interior painted, new vinyl flooring installed in several places, and the carpet cleaned, and a couple of weeks later he was ready to move in!
To
Next Page of Photo Album
Back
to Index of Pages from Early 2001
Back
to Photo Albumnew 17 December 2001, revised 2 September 2002