View from the Porch

One of the things I like best about living here is the wide view of the weather. We have views and light from every window in the house. We can see the sky and the clouds. But it wasn't always this way. 

In Berkeley we lived in a Craftsman house designed by John Hudson Thomas in 1907. There were fabulous views from the hills behind the house of San Francisco Bay, the bridges over it  and the city. I loved the house and the changes and renovations we made during the 45 years we lived and raised our children there. But we had no view.

We weren't compelled to move. In fact we were quite happy where we were, but Berkeley was changing. The town I had lived in since I left home to go to college had gone through many changes. Several of our closet neighbors had moved. Traffic was bad. The university was taking over the most scenic areas of the town and covering them with ugly buildings. OilMan was on the verge of retirement and it seemed to me that, although many people do it, we shouldn't live in the same house our entire lives. 

We thought about moving and talked about moving for so long that most of our friends had given up the idea that we would ever do it. I'm not sure we even knew if we would, but after three years of seemingly fruitless house hunting in Sonoma County,  just as we were about to give up, we found our house. 

Everybody told us that when we found the right house, we would know it, and we did. It took us five minutes to decide we wanted to live here. We made an offer the following day which was accepted a day or two after that and we moved a month later. It took us a year to recover from that....

I think what really sold us was the light and the fact that we could see the sky without ever leaving the house. We can watch the birds from the living room window, and sit outside in the garden on summer evenings with a glass of wine. Charming as it was, we couldn't even see the street from our Berkeley house. It was paneled with beautiful redwood, but it was dark. We saw our neighbor's kitchen from our TV room, our other neighbor's front porch from our kitchen. The final straw might have been when the neighbor behind us built a deck that loomed over our tiny back yard.

Even though we moved here in November and it was raining, the first thing I noticed when when I got up on our first morning here was the light. We may not have known exactly what we were looking for during those three years of house hunting. We may not even have realized exactly what it was when we bought the house,  but the deciding factor was the light and the view.