Random Sonoma Scenes!

Fixers

Cloverdale Fixer at 315 N Cloverdale Blvd

Cloverdale Fixer

Cloverdale is suffering from the housing bubble collapse, but that doesn’t mean the town is dead. It just means that bargains are available for buyers who would like to be in Healdsburg, but have been priced out of the market. There’s plenty of charm in Cloverdale, the wine tastes just as great, and the money [...]

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Two Rock

The Two Rocks of Two Rock

We often speak place names without thinking about what they mean. For instance, there are four Grand Views in Sonoma County, one each in Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Petaluma, and Camp Meeker. Some of these live up to their name with truly grand views. Others, not so much.  There are oak place names all over  Sonoma County. [...]

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Healdsburg Fixer

Fixers Seeking Dreamers

Nicely-boned large fixers from the Victorian through Craftsman eras have always attracted me. In the first place, their exterior designs are often beautiful, and almost always handsome. Clearly, that was the goal of their first owners who wanted to live in a home suitable to their station in life. Building plans by mail and in [...]

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Healdsburg Machine Shop

Healdsburg Machine Shop

It’s not typical to get wine industry history, real estate, and fascinating collectibles in one post. The listing of 452 Healdsburg Avenue in Healdsburg as a commercial real estate investment precedes a mid March auction of the contents of the building, a hub of inventiveness in the wine industry after prohibition ended. Healdsburg Machine Shop [...]

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Tumblewed Tiny House

Tiny and Small Houses

There’s a small house to be had in Sebastopol. Well, small might be too grand a term for a house less than 200 square feet, but the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company is drawing national attention for their tiny houses and house plans ranging from 65 to an expansive 837 square feet. Jay Shafer, the driving [...]

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Level slopes and drainage

Houses, Slopes, and Water

Today my clients looked at a house sited downslope from the road with clearly insufficient drainage. Clearly because you could simply look at the driveway and follow the path of least resistance for the water right under the garage door into the garage…which showed clear water damage including a big crack in the floor. There [...]

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Textured wall heater

Home Depot is not a four letter word

Badly done home remodels aren’t the fault of Home Depot. Too many homeowners watching “Flip this House” or “Trading Places” got themselves focused on the wrong aspects of home repair. The fundamentals of construction techniques that have evolved over centuries were ignored in favor of flashy fixtures and false ideas about quality and materials. Well [...]

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Fitch Mountain Fixer (Not Available)

Fitch Mountain dominates Healdsburg’s east side. The mountain fills the skyline and forces the Russian River to make a wide swing around the town. The blue circled area in the photo holds several hundred homes along S Fitch Mountain Road, N Fitch MountainRoad, Redwood Drive, and a network of other small roads that are in [...]

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Sebastopol Field of Dreams

We all do visual double takes. Is that a Llama or goat or what? For all of us it’s a familiar experience, particularly since life is zooming by and we usually don’t have time to see things carefully the first time. When I looked at this property the first time I certainly made a bunch [...]

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Entropy 101, or why leaks matter

I was creating some graphic headers for this site and realized that I had just made a whole bunch of pictures of entropy in action. I could do a complicated discussion of the second law of thermodynamics, but you can read that here if you’re interested. From our real world perspective, entropy is iron rusting, [...]

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