Love, Sandy: August 2013

I was reminded today of a few years back when we lived in our South San Francisco house and my niece used to come over on Sundays and we'd go look at houses for sale. It was fun to look at homes that had been staged for sale and how they were decorated and what changes had been made to the original design of the house. There's no new building on the San Francisco Peninsula unless something is torn down and something completely new built. There's no new land unless you fill in the bay to make new land or build up the sides of San Bruno Mountain. Both have been done.

One home we went into on an Open House Sunday was on the street on the hill behind me up about two blocks. It had been freshly painted and staged with beautiful furniture and had a wonderful view across the small valley that was actually the rip zone for the San Andreas fault line that ran through Westborough subdivision. My own house lies about a thousand feet from the rip zone. It had three bedrooms and two baths, and a kitchen completely redone with refaced cabinets, new floors, counter tops and appliances. Everything smelled and looked wonderful. The walled entrance led past a glass enclosed garden between the garage and the front door. This had been done in lieu of an open front courtyard. My niece was entranced and put in a bid and I'll say now she was outbid.

I was entranced myself until I walked into the two car garage from the sitting room off the kitchen. It was like walking into a room in a scary black and white movie. It was cold and dark and grey and looked older than the fifty years since the house had been built. As I was standing on the top step ready to step down I stopped and really looked around. It was of course empty of anything personal from the people who had lived there. There was the furnace and built in cabinets and sink ready for a clothes washer and dryer and the ceiling was open to the roof. The garage door was closed. On the side of the steps was a wooden ledge that wasn't anything but a box which seemed out of place. I stopped there and went back into the bright and warm house.

What we didn't know at the time was that a ninety year old woman had lived there alone. She had taken her own life by hanging herself from a rafter in the garage and had been there a while before she was found. This, of course, was the reason the person who was showing the house had incense burning in the living room and the reason for the lower asking price for the house. When I found this out I couldn't help imagining the old lady standing on that ledge beside the steps and somehow throwing the rope over a cross beam and tying it to something......then stepping off.

We don't know who bought the house although that's public record and we know the suicide would have been disclosed in the sale. A couple of months later I drove by that house and saw that the new owners were replacing the concrete floor in the garage and the driveway. I wonder if they found the garage as creepy as I had.

My niece is still living in her lovely townhouse on the other side of South San Francisco and it's accruing more value every day. Buyer beware. Sometimes being outbid is not a bad thing.