I posted this in the Calif. forum but forgot to share it here.
http://cubits.org/Califliving/...

Congratulations! I have bought a foreclosed house so I have a hint of the complexities that you have survived. Well done!

Congratulations! I hope you love your new place. That area has always felt right to me when I've visited. Not many do.

The house we now live in was a bank-owned property that had suffered from more neglect than we knew when we bought it, despite paying the most notoriously nit-picky inspector $500 to inspect. But the location was worth almost as much as what we paid for the house, IMO.

Enjoy the roses!

CONGRATS!!!

Steve, that saying 'location, location, location' was the main reason we stuck it out for this one! Nice quiet neighborhood, a loop street with 27 homes so no through traffic, the HOA takes care of the three wells that is shared by all the homes, a slight downward slope in the backyard that backs up to a greenbelt with tall shrubs on both sides obscuring the neighbors and this house is the only one that needs some curb appeal so the value can only rise once it's fixed up, we hope.

I added a new fun link on the Calif. thread where you can see an aerial view.

Thanks PP and Liz! We are excited!

I just looked at the bird's eye view - Wow! What a lovely area. I can certainly see why it was worth the hassle.

It makes up for the inside which is pretty much original to the house from 1978, except the new hardwood floors.

It looks fabulous. Lots of space to spread out and grow roses.

As you said, "Location, location, location." You can always do work on the house. But it is impossible to change the surrounding terrain in any meaningful way. Privacy can seem like a great luxury if one has lived for a while crammed into a development with lots of nearby neighbors.

A lot of people move to Prescott and buy their dream homes on scorched earth properties. And so there are a lot of fantastically beautiful houses here. Ours was not one of them. As our insurance agent said "You bought the house for the location." Turns out we are still improving the house. It's an expensive form of entertainment for one of us.

Steve812 said:Turns out we are still improving the house. It's an expensive form of entertainment for one of us.

I would hazard a guess that it's not you?

It's a good guess. But actually, my wife is the person with the mind best suited to serious, productive things. So my niche in the family is the trivial and mundane. DW prefers not to be distracted by the details of the improvements, but I sometimes need to involve her to bring her along ...

Looks like the next improvement might be an indoor pool and an elevator. Even though it's a two-story house you have to climb three flights of stairs (the ceiling of the garage is 18 ft high) to carry giant boxes of Costco stuff from the garage to the kitchen. Not fun. Also, while the view of the garden is grand, it's difficult to feel connected to it. So we'll put in a patio at garage/pool level so we can live closer to the garden. Or more like a terrace. It's another six feet down to the upper terrace of the garden.

And all walls over 2 ft tall (that's right, 24 inches) must be engineered! I guess the structural engineers here have to get paid to do something now that the building trade is dead.

You can be thankful for gentle grades.