This is a picture of the house across the street, taken on a recent Monday morning: 
Here is the same spot the following afternoon. 
Soon another home will appear, all shiny and new.
Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas
Words and pictures and stuff
A note of little consequence: This was the first time I posted with my phone (since that was where the pictures were). I think the WordPress app cropped the sides from the images, making them feel even more poorly-composed than they already were. I could fix them, but… meh.
Here’s betting the new home is two stories, twice to three times the square-footage, and zero lot lines for no yard. The American dream has expanded with our waistlines.
The rules are a little different in my neighborhood, although there are now two-story “manufactured homes”. But the Inquisitive Neighbor reports that the new quad-wide that will be dropped onto that lot went for well north of $400,000 — more than $300,000 over what we paid for our own quad-wide (which was built when you and I were still in high school, and has the paneling to prove it).
Fun fact: my home is registered with the DMV. But for a fraction of what an apartment would cost to rent we have room for a little photo studio.
Also, were this a “fixed home”, the demolition would have preserved the garage door or the partition in the laundry room to weasel out of Prop 13 tax escalation.
True.
This week, after an amazingly inefficient rebuild, we now have neighbors across the street for the first time since we moved in.