We bought this house in 1974, the first home we ever owned. Three bedrooms, one bath, kitchen and living room. 900 square feet. $35,000, significantly less than we paid for our Tesla 3 almost four years ago. When we owned it we kept the original redwood color. We converted the garage into a family room and added a second bathroom. We lived there for three years, during which time we experienced approximately ten auto accidents in front of the house, one of which went into the wall of our bedroom. Jason was a year old when we bought the house; Jennifer was born when we lived there. We sold it in 1978 for approximately $70,000, leaving the “good side of town” for the “bad side.”
766 Brush Creek Road, Santa Rosa, CA 2019
And here’s our house on the bad side of town.
1524 Dutton Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95407
John was born in 1979 while we lived here. We paid $85,000 for the house, using what we had made from the sale of our Brush Creek Road house, and with the timely gift of $5000 from Alyce, were able to buy a much larger house. Behind the house was a barn, as the property had once been an active farm, then a prune orchard. Much of the land had been sold before we bought it, but in California, where land is so scarce, we had a national park. We lived here for twenty-six years, and this became the home of David Buchholz Photography, where I made my millions, or my thousands, or enough to send three kids to college and fund a retirement that lead us to where we live now, 330 Rugby Avenue, Kensington, CA.
We sold the house in 2004 for $600,000 during the height of what became known as the real estate bubble, a time when banks would allow unqualified people to borrow enough money to buy things they couldn’t afford, reaping the whirlwind that inevitably followed from greed and carelessness.
We were one month away from paying off a fifteen year mortgage, when we had to refinance in order to buy this house for $795,000. We bought it in 2001, rented it for three years, then moved down eighteen years ago in June, 2004. I’m looking around. It appears we still live there.
330 Rugby Avenue, Kensington, CA 94708
In the meantime we owned several other houses, none of which we lived in. A financial planner advised us to buy single-family homes, believing that even if our mortgage would be higher than the rents, the houses would appreciate in value, and that the appreciation would help provide a retirement income. We did that. At one time we “owned” four houses. We sold one of them for $7000 less than we paid for it, and during the time we owned it, lost about $25,000, the difference between the rent we collected and our mortgage payments.
We bought a duplex on Woolsey Avenue in Berkeley in 1999, and in the course of the twenty-three years we’ve owned it, our tenants have included our three kids and their friends. We close escrow on February 28th, 2022, and the proceeds will be transferred to this house, a future home to Jason, Hazel, and Hawthorn.
6115 Ralston Avenue, Richmond, CA.
Escrow closes on March 7th. What still makes me shudder is that our first home on Brush Creek Road sold for 35,000. This one, about the same size, sold for 28.1428571 times that.