On the Hunt for a House

Friday, March 28, 2008

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

On the Hunt for a House

By J’AMY PACHECO

I hate moving.

While I enjoy the adventure that comes with living in a new place, I despise the packing and unpacking that have to happen before the adventure can begin. This has been particularly true for the last 12 years, since I gave birth to a child who doesn’t like getting rid of anything, ever.

I’ve moved a lot over the years. In fact, I’ve lived in seven different homes since I left my last little apartment in 1989.

Now, I’m looking for number eight.

We’ve been desert dwellers for the past 18 years. There are certainly some advantages to living in the High Desert – not the least of which is air quality. While our neighbors “down the hill” have to chew the air before breathing, the desert continues to boast mostly-clear skies filled with relatively clean air.

While it can get uncomfortably hot up here in the summer, nights cool down so much that one often needs a sweater to go out. I love sleeping with my upstairs windows open to a cool, summer breeze.

It has its downfalls, however. The most obvious is the mountain pass that separates desert dwellers from the rest of the world and closes regularly for snowfall in the winter, fire in the summer; fog and train wrecks in between. It’s a worrisome thing for a parent, wondering if they’ll be able to get home to collect their offspring at the end of the day.

Almost a year ago, my husband started working in downtown Los Angeles. It’s an 84-mile commute each way involving a drive through the pass before 5 a.m., catching a train in Rancho Cucamonga, changing trains at Union Station and walking to the office. The whole process has to be reversed each evening.

The commute is wearing him down, and my daughter’s time with him is mostly limited to weekends. Those facts were enough to cause us to start thinking it might be time to move. Since my daughter is in her last year of elementary school and has to change schools anyway, it seems like now is the time.

We recently started looking at houses “down there.” Being relatively unfamiliar with the residential areas, we decided to start by looking at new housing tracts. We couldn’t help noticing two things right off – the houses sat on unbelievably small lots with backyards no larger than you’d expect to find behind an inner-city condominium – and houses are getting really tall.

In two of the three developments we toured, we found models of three-story homes. These weren’t the sprawling, gracious three-story homes you’d expect to find on a hilltop in Malibu – these were boxy-looking mini skyscrapers.

In each model, the top floor was decorated as a game room. My daughter loved the idea of having a tower in which to wield her Wii controller, but all I could think about was the fact that you’d need a vacuum cleaner for each floor of the house.

I’ve lived in two-story houses for years, and know how impractical it is to heat and cool them. I couldn’t begin to imagine how hot it would get in that upper play room in the summer, and how cold it would remain on the ground while all the heat went skyward. Our current home has such temperature differences between floors that I suspect steaks would fry on the upstairs counters while they’d freeze downstairs – and it’s only a two-story.

We never see my husband now. I suspect in a three-story house, we wouldn’t get to see him, either. We’d never be able to find him.

Perhaps the most shocking element of those little sky-scratchers was the price tag – in the high $600,000s. If I had almost a million bucks to spend on a house, I’d want to have a lot big enough that I could at least see some of the dirt I’d purchased.

I read that three-story homes are considered to be “cost efficient alternatives to sprawling one level designs.” They may be cost effective to build, but you’ll be heating and cooling them for many years to come.

Plus, that’s a heck of a distance to have to jump in case of fire.

There’s another consideration — I’m constantly starting upstairs and then forgetting what I was going for. It would be twice as bad if I had two sets of stairs to climb. On the bright side, I’d be in better shape – assuming I didn’t lose consciousness on the way up because of the thinner, high altitude air.

Especially if I had to chew it first.