So, we bought it. We had our Unicorn. Now, what to do with it?
It was clear that we needed some transformation to make our forever home. I started making lists. Lots of lists.
What did we want?
New kitchen with island.
Custom cabinets throughout the house.
Creation of a new walk-in pantry between the kitchen & the hallway. Kudos to Kim, our superstar real estate agent, that saw the opportunity to build this pantry by converting a space that had a built-in television. We added found space on the other side of the back wall, that had some cabinetry in the hallway … delivering a space that is 4’x6′. Perfect for a pantry.
New appliances for the new dream kitchen.
New plumbing fixtures for the new bathrooms.
Recessed lighting + ceiling fans in all rooms.
Smart controls for appliances, lighting, thermostat, sprinklers … and more.
Finally, the home’s 3 car garage would become a 1 car garage for Mrs M, and a 2-car garage shop for me.
A new table saw. And, at long last, a miter saw to easily break down lumber.
So then I started making spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets.
We met with our first contractor before we had the keys. That didn’t work out. He was in a transition – building his new shop/retail location, we were still developing the plan, we didn’t have possession yet … no. Strike 1.
Lots of planning went into every room … or in this case, shop. I get a purpose-built space that has the tools & space for the work I actually do. I can break down a 4’x8′ sheet of plywood, or cut a 12′ long board without breaking a sweat. In the shop. Without moving tools. Without using the driveway.
We met our 2nd contractor on February 28, the day we took possession. This was a big idea guy that had a particular way he wanted to do a big job like ours. Big job. Very professional presentation from the jump. I met all of the sub contractors he would recommend to us, and then the wheels started to come off. The cabinet guy was on vacation and could not meet with us for a week. And we lost a week before we even got started.
OK, that happens. But then this cabinet maker came back to meet with us, and couldn’t commit to a time he could begin construction. After several days, we got his quote (he accidentally sent it to us directly. Oopsie.) Then we got the entire consolidated quote from the general contractor a few days later.
The quote was over our projected budget, but more importantly, there was no promise of timing AT ALL. No projected date to begin. Just … approve this budget and we will talk about it.
Uh, no. I was in sales my whole life, and as we saw with Williams Homes, when sales techniques annoy me, I run for the hills. Strike 2.
I started to look for tradesmen myself. Then, I finally listened to our son-in-law. He knew a guy.
This guy, whom I met when Little Girl married son-in-law, was a childhood friend that grew up to be a contractor. And a groomsman, for that matter.
It happens. And life-long friends can be a wonderful thing.
Contractor #3 promised to introduce me to the right people. He would help & advise, but I would be left to supervise the process that we were oh, so invested in.
I began to stitch together a team. Some vendors were recommended to me, some we found on our own. All were available to begin work … soon. Very soon.
I created floorplans. Worklists. Ideas to be incorporated into each room.
We hired crews for garage door opener installation, epoxy floor installation, kitchen demo, plumbing, stone work, electrical, cabinetry, HVAC, roofing, chimney service, paint, carpet, and a keymaster. We bought appliances, plumbing fixtures, tile and stone slabs. We chose colors. We bought carpet.
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.
I had been living with it for a while before I decided I was done. She was done. The problem, you see, was her knees. Going up stairs had become a painful process for her … and I wanted to end her pain.
You know what I mean. At least, I hope you know what I mean.
So I suggested it was time to leave the familial home of 37 years. Leave the 2nd story behind, and find a one story house. It was time.
And just like that, we were searching for a new house.
It didn’t take long for us to find a local, new development called Williams Ranch. The models were oh-so-spiffy, and we began the process of selecting our new forever home. It took a minute, but this planned community of a development had a few features that caught our eyes. Mrs M could get her dream kitchen, at long last. And I could get a nice shop as well, in an oversized garage (they called it an RV garage) that could be the new home of the Woodshop.
Thus began a courtship that lasted over a year. This whole buying a house thing was not easy, we found.
The sign that initially caught our eye. Unfortunately, after 2 years of development, they had never built a Toy Garage. Size was unknown. RV garages had been built … but rarely. Red Flag # 1.
We met our first sales rep in November of ’23. We had settled on a model #9 as our target, and he showed us a couple that they had built. One was ready to move in, one just needed us to select the flooring.
But there was no RV garage. We said no.
And the sales rep said “I don’t think this will work out for you,” kicked us to the curb, and assigned a new sales rep to handle us. OK, whatever. I spent more than 2 decades running a sales team, and I do understand that things happen. I also understand that when a rep doesn’t like the prospect, nothing good will happen.
Our new sales rep, however, was wonderful. It was now January of ’24, and she took us to the site of a future model #9, plot 40. We could even get it with an RV garage!
But, sales rep #2 told us, we would have to buy a retaining wall to move the slope on the lot back to make room for the RV garage. No worries, the developer would split the cost with is, so it was only an additional $75,000. Further, #2 told us, when we went to contract we would have to put down $25,000 as a deposit, plus pay 50% for all upgrades as they were added to the contract. So, in this case, the opening deposit would be $25,000 + $75,000 for the wall + $70,000 for the RV garage. Due immediately.
But first, before we could do ANYTHING, we needed to get credit pre-approval from their approved lender, which would do a loan application, credit check, and verify that we could actually buy the house.
That was all fascinating information. Information that our previous rep never shared with us (because it wasn’t going to work out for us, I’m sure).
So we had 2 things that had to get done: get credit approval, and get down payment funds lined up. We did the application and got a contingent credit approval on January 30, 2024. The contingency was that we needed to sell our current house to buy the new house.
After consulting with our excellent real estate agent, Kim Thompson, (who is a long-time client of the Woodshop), we determined that we needed to get a HELOC.
Which I had never heard of.
Home Equity Line Of Credit, HELOC, would allow us to cash out some equity from our current, mortgage-free home, and use those funds to purchase a new house. OK, that would work. Our days of having no mortgage were over, and we got the HELOC to prepare for our purchase of the mythical model # 9.
Which Williams Ranch would not sell to us. Apparently the lot #40 that we rejected due to the retaining wall was the only possible RV garage available in the development until … well, we don’t know when. Later. Whenever the developer releases a lot that is big enough. Which we don’t know when it will be. At all.
We offered to make a down payment so we were first in line for this mythical new house. No, sorry. No down payment wanted. They didn’t want our money, because they had “no idea” when they might be ready to build a house for us.
It was April ’24, and we were beyond frustrated. The developer shared almost no forward-looking information with us. We could buy what they had … or wait.
We waited.
Summer heated up, as expected, and eventually the upcoming “phase 15” was identified as having 2 homes that might work for us. Lot 75 had a model #12 which would have an RV garage. The money was a bit more for this larger home, but finally we had a shot. Also, lot 76 would be for a model #9 which might be able to have an RV garage, too. Maybe. Our sales rep, #2, told us our credit pre-approval from their preferred lender was first in line, so this could work. We were first in line.
September rolled around, and there was trouble in paradise. Yes, they were building the homes. No, we were no longer first in line. Because someone with an all-cash offer jumped the line.
Which sales rep #2 never told us would be a possibility.
The plot of a Plan 12 … only available with dimensions by taking a picture of the big monitor in the show room. Sales materials were lacking at times. Red Flag # 2.
We immediately found another way forward, and received “credit” approval for an all-cash offer on the house within a week. The new approval letter was dated September 14. But, our new all-cash offer date was in September, so we were no longer in first place. We were too late to the dance.
And the model #9 … would not have an RV garage. It would have “just” a 3rd car garage, because that was all there was room for on this particular lot.
And no, no deposit was possible. But we were not first in line for the #12 and although we were first in line for the #9, that could change at any moment since the developer could choose to do business with someone else if they chose. Pre-approvals were not binding.
It was September, and after pursuing a home purchase with Williams Ranch for 11 months, we had NOTHING. No schedule. No commitment. No plan.
Kim, our real estate agent, was as hot as we were, and she escalated the issue to Sales Rep #2’s Sales Manager. And her Vice President. And his President. They all said we were out of luck. Their choice. Their development. Buh-bye.
We were beyond angry.
Then Sales Rep #2 got fired.
This actually offended me, as Sales Rep #2 was the only company representative that shared relevant information with us. To this day, I do not believe that Sales Rep #2 cost us our purchase. I believe Sales Rep #1, to use the vernacular, snaked the sale by knowing our original contingent credit approval date, and worked with his client to beat it. Do I know that? No.
But I do know that #2 got fired as this whole bunch of crap came to light, and I very much regret that, as I believe she did nothing wrong. Perhaps she did not understand company policy correctly. Perhaps her boss or her boss’s boss did not train her properly. I’ll never know.
But I do know this: when the client is angry, nothing good follows. I am enough of a sales guy that when I am mistreated by a company, I don’t want to give them my money.
At all.
So in the Fall of 2024, we began to look for alternatives, as we continued to keep our eye on the #12 or the #9. Which would be available for sale … someday. Maybe to us, or maybe not. No way to know.
