MowryJournal.com   Life's Passions

It was the Fall of ’24, and we were distraught by the difficulty of buying a new house. We made up a priority list:

• A single story home. We talked about going smaller, but we decided to stick with a 4+3: 4 bedrooms, 3 baths. Converting 2 bedrooms would make an office for me and an office today or a hobby room for Mrs M in her retirement, and still leave a guest room for our visitors.
• Mrs M’s perfect kitchen: Room to cook. An island. A conversation area. The center of the home.
• A shop space for me. A place to create. A place to escape from Mrs M.
• A nice, quiet location in Castaic or nearby Santa Clarita.

Surprise! That’s almost impossible to find.

Come to find out, single story homes are relatively rare in the Santa Clarita Valley, where larger 2-story homes are built on the standard lots to increase builder profits. In some newer developments now selling in Santa Clarita, all 1-story homes are designated as 55+ senior communities. If you want to live in an all ages neighborhood … that pretty much means you are in a 2-story house.

Unless you go searching for perfection, it seems. When we started I had no idea that a single story home with a great kitchen & some nice shop space would be unusual. Or hard to find.

Oopsie. We were looking for a unicorn.

Kim to the rescue! Our real estate agent automated some email searches for us, and we began getting emails of 1-story homes for sale in our area. We also got emails of all homes for sale in our immediate neighborhood. We supplemented those emails based on the MLS real estate listings with our own searches on Zillow … all of which helped us understand what we were up against.

We went to see some homes.

A 6 acre property up Hasley Canyon … nice in a rural setting. EXCELLENT shop. But this older home’s kitchen didn’t pass muster, and we decided we really didn’t want a large property to take care of.

A lovely, updated home in old Newhall in the style of a Spanish hacienda. Nice 4-car garage I could convert to a shop. But, this older home had additions built on a time or 3, so the layout was just a bit odd. Lovely kitchen, but dark. And, yikes, it was expensive. In the end, it just wasn’t … right. Like Harry Potter trying to use the wrong magic wand. We kept looking.

There was horse property up Placerita Canyon that was interesting. Room to build a shop. But, there were steps to enter and steps to get to the dining room. This became a hard no for that reason … Mrs M has seen houses just not work for her elderly patients because of a step or 2 in the living space. Since this wants to be our forever home, we didn’t want to buy a problem in the making.

Another home in the Placerita Canyon neighborhood popped up, and it was a lovely property. Large lawn + a swimming pool in the back yard. 6 car garage/outbuilding with an RV garage door. But, the living room was actually a converted garage with a 7′ ceiling. Bedrooms were oddly laid out … we thought about it. I worked the numbers. And the house had multiple offers above the asking price immediately, so we just moved on. No 6 car garage for me.

Lovely homes up Hasley Canyon Road (just like the Williams Homes development), but none that were on sale checked off our boxes … those not for sale did not matter, no matter how lovely they appeared to be while on our drive-bys of the neighborhoods we were interested in.

An older home on The Old Road (fitting, that) in Castaic came up, and it had nice parking space for my trailer and little else, actually. There was a bit of property … but it was hillside. It was landscaped, sprinkled … and a fire risk. Hard no.

We visited one of the new developments near us, Tesoro. Single story & 55+ only. Postage stamp yards. I mean, tiny even by LA standards. The driveways in front of the garages were not big enough to park on, it seemed, without covering the sidewalk. The homes were truly lovely … but no.

We drove through the new developments behind Magic Mountain. Several developments are growing here, but none seemed like they were our unicorn. We kept driving.

Time passed. Suddenly, it was January 2025, and we were seemingly no closer to any decisions. Unicorns are rare, after all.

And Mrs M’s knees were not good. She went bionic on January 10 with a TKR: Total Knee Replacement. So, naturally, a nice looking house was found on January 11. I went to see it with Kim, and I was very interested. Mrs M, meanwhile, could barely walk.

So we gave it 48 hours, and her first outing after surgery was to go see what was our unicorn. We put an offer in, endured a very small bidding war with another buyer, and our offer to buy the house was accepted in a week. We closed after a short escrow, and got the keys on February 28.

We developed plans. Big plans. The house was very nice, but needed Velda’s perfect kitchen and updated bathrooms. The shop part of the 3 car garage needed extensive electrical work. Suddenly, we owned 2 houses and a new hobby: making our forever home.

Our new house is fully landscaped, which is a nice relief versus buying new construction. The exterior will be untouched, for now. The interior … we’re going all in.

And just to prove that God has a sense of humor, while we were in escrow, Williams Homes reached out to Kim to say that they were (finally) ready to allow us to buy Lot 76, that Model #9 with a 3-car garage. Sorry, Buttercup. I was a very good prospect for Williams Homes, but now I’m … just not interested in doing business with you.

Next Up: Developing A Plan

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Finding Our New Home