Five things I love* about my home

*I waffled quite a bit on whether “love” or “like” was appropriate in the title. I don’t really feel like there is anything I LOVE about my home, but you know what, I’m going to go with LOVE because I am EMBRACING POSITIVITY DAMMIT! So let’s do this.

Location. I’m chuckling at starting with location because when we were first looking at houses I didn’t even know this neighborhood existed, it’s so far south. I was like, where even is that? And then I was like, Oh my god, Mission CROSSES 280?! (It actually goes all the way south to Daly City, little did I know at the time…) My point being, I used to live in a young, stylish, fun! neighborhood with good bars and restaurants and cool stuff to do. ALL the Muni trains stopped there and it was super easy to get anywhere in the city from that centralized location. Contrast that with where I live now, on the almost most southerly side of the city, where our stretch of Mission is riddled with many more closed, graffiti covered store fronts than decent restaurants (and basically no bars). Also, NO Muni trains come within 15 minutes walking of our house. But! We are two blocks from several stellar bus lines, and a 10 minutes walk from BART. Most importantly, we are far enough south that I can get home without hitting any of the city traffic, which was not-so-slowly killing my soul when I lived in the much nicer part of the city. So yes, my middle aged ass appreciates where we live very much.

The unit, aka our main bedroom suite. This house was actually about $100K out of our price range, but it had been on the market for three weeks and had an in-law unit that had just been vacated (that is actually why it was still on the market, because they were trying to sell the house WITH the tenants initially). We had been out-bid on all the other houses in our price range by $100-$150K, so we felt like we couldn’t just pass the house up, and we were assured we could just rent the in-law unit out to make up the difference until we could cover the mortgage ourselves, no problem! (rolls eyes so far back into head). And we did have a couple of hassle free tenants who did allow us to pay our mortgage no problem, until of course we didn’t. Luckily, by the time we were faced with a nightmare tenant who wouldn’t manage his things enough to make the bed bug treatments were paying for effective ::cough:: hording tendencies ::cough::, we were not only able to cover our mortgage without his $1,100 monthly rent payment, but we were able to pay him $20K to leave too! (Yes, you read that right, yes, being a landlord in SF is not for the families trying to make ends meet). We waved goodbye to said tenant in late JANUARY 2020. And we had no idea how lucky we were until a couple months later when that separated space became the only thing keeping us sane during the pandemic.

I still LOVE the space so much. Sure we need to walk behind our car and down an ugly hallway to get to it, but it’s 400 square feet of OUR OWN SPACE and it has a big bathroom and a little kitchen where my Peloton bike goes, and we can host small groups there without people ever seeing the rest of the house and it’s just the best thing ever and I love it so. It would have been hard to make the choice to give up a tenant’s rent, and I’m so grateful that we were forced to because the space is absolutely worth it and I will never, ever be a landlord again, if I can help it.

Space. Our house is 1600sq ft, with the in-law unit, which is plenty of space for our family of four. I know most people in the country live in much bigger houses (my parents’ house, just 30 minutes south, is twice as big I think), but this is as big a house as I can manage, and while I sometimes wish we had more and better storage space, I don’t think we need more living space.

Garage! Ten years of street parking in a popular neighborhood was honestly kind of traumatic. I spent so many minutes (hours!) looking for parking, and so much money fixing the windows when someone broke into my car. I’ve had a garage for 12 years and there is not a day I take pulling into it for granted. We don’t even have an automatic garage door opener (I have to get out and swing the door open), but I don’t care. I love having a garage, and I love having a washing machine and dryer in my garage. Both are truly the best.

A super-low, 30-year fixed mortgage rate. We bought our house in 2012. We locked in a 3.25% mortgage rate, that later we refinanced down to a 2.95% a few years later. We were very fortunate that my parents borrowed $100K against their own home to “gift” us, so we could put 20% down at signing, and we’re only 13 months away from our last payment to them for that “gift.” Our mortgage payment is very manageable and our house has supposedly more than doubled in value since we purchased it 12.5 years ago. We were VERY lucky to buy when we did. We could never afford to live in this house if we were trying to buy now.

There is PLENTY that I hate about our house. I’m sure I’ll write that post later this month, but mostly I’m just very grateful that we get to live here, and are not at the whim of a landlord who would eventually want to kick us out. There is plenty to gripe about when it comes to this house, but the good definitely outweighs the bad.