DigitalHobbit

I would apologize for the recent lack of updates if anybody besides myself was actually reading my blog…

Anyway, we moved to our new house in San Francisco last weekend, and overall everything was pretty smooth. Of course, with two little kids it takes a lot longer to unpack everything and settle in, so the garage is still full of boxes and I haven’t even started with my office. But the actual living area is mostly complete already.

It’s definitely great to be back in San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to exploring the neighborhood, trying out all the restaurants, etc.

We had a home inspection for our new house today, and we still love it. We need to do some fairly minor electrical upgrades and fix a few other things, but overall everything is in great shape.

We also took the opportunity to drive around a little in our neighborhood as well as adjacent neighborhoods. The house itself is in Merced Heights, a pretty decent and family friendly, but otherwise somewhat boring area. After trying to figure out the closest areas with shopping and restaurants, we ended up in West Portal, which is only about 5 minutes by car from our house. I have to say it looks like a very nice little neighborhood, with a ton of nice-looking restaurants that seem to cover pretty much all cuisines, as well as cafes, several bookstores, and other shops.

Before we had kids and moved to Concord about 3 years ago, we lived in San Francisco for 2 1/2 years. Therefore, we were quite surprised that we had never come across West Portal before. I think we just rarely ventured this far south and stayed north of Golden Gate Park most of the time. It looks like there is certainly a lot to explore in the southern regions of San Francisco, and of course now that we have children (which we did not have when we last lived in the city), we see everything with different eyes anyway.

The many different little areas are one of the things we like most about San Francisco. Even though the city is not all that big, it offers so many completely different places: Downtown, Northbeach, Chinatown, Richmond, the Castro, Mission, Haight Ashbury, West Portal, and many more. We can’t wait to move back to San Francisco, although it looks like we won’t be able to move before July 20.

We got it! Unfortunately (well, I guess fortunately, since we would not have gotten it otherwise) our initial offer was countered and we had to increase the offer amount (which was already beyond our original limit) quite a bit. Oh well… I’m trying not to think about the amount and instead be happy that we got the place we wanted.

I am feeling very jittery today because we are about to make an offer on a house in San Francisco, and while the offer price is high enough that it will likely ruin us financially, we are expecting so much fierce competition about this property that the chances of actually getting it are probably fairly slim. So please keep your fingers crossed, because we really love this place.