In 2022 we moved to an apartment on Palma Street in El Grenada. We liked the area (Jen liked being near the barn) so in February 2023 we sold our house on Chardonnay Court in Fremont and moved into a house on San Carlos Ave in El Grenada. Here are some pictures!

It's a two floor house on a pretty small lot. The bedrooms are downstairs, so the big front window in the living room and the deck have an ocean view. There is a two car detached garage in back and the driveway is only one car wide.

Here is the view we have when watching TV. (Guess what show it is.)

I'm sure we will have more view pictures; this one shows a little too much house but we can see waves from the living room. It's a little over a half mile to the ocean, less than 10 minutes walk.

After moving

Here are some pictures from the first week. You'll see boxes all over and nothing hung on the walls yet. So the pictures make more sense, here is the floorplan. Upstairs (right side) is basically one big room, with the stairs up to it in the middle. What they call the living room, we call Jen's office. Downstairs, there are three bedrooms and three full baths, and only one closet. That is kind of weird. The main bedroom has a walk-in closet, the other bedrooms have no closet but they each have a tiny private full bath. There's a closet under the stairs, and that is it for closet space.

Jen in the kitchen, a few hours after moving in.

Jen's office, looking out onto the deck.

The living room ("family room" on the floorplan)

The main bedroom, looking to the front of the house (left on the floorplan).

Move-in crisis

It all turned out OK, but there was a kind of crisis just before we moved in. After closing, it turned out they had left tons of stuff behind. The garage and the downstairs storage room were packed with their debris. Both of us, and our real estate agent, were kind of shocked. The agent wrote up a document showing what we found. Warning, graphic descriptions.

Move-in status document

Here's the garage full of their stuff. This is after we piled it all to one side; originally the entire garage was layered like that. Fortunately we could eventually get both our cars into it, with our storage racks along the back. It's a tight fit because of the driveway.

Here's the storage room full of their stuff. After it was all hauled to the dump (for $900) we bought wire storage racks and started filling it with our own storage boxes.

We were hoping to just move in without doing repairs, but they had hung shelves in every room using wallboard screws (and in some cases, cardboard shims?). So there was a project to spackle and spot paint each room. Fortunately they had left behind all the exact paint they used.