This Modern Life

We took a break from the renovations to stop by a local open-house. This home is in the Oakland hills in one of the smaller, "lost" Eichler developments of Sequoia Hills. As the story goes, it’s been sitting empty and vacant, (save the silver ’78 Camaro Z28 in the garage) for the past 7 years. The home is a one-owner and was bought by a woman and she lived there with her son.

While I’m not a fan of this pagoda-style roof, the chance to step inside was amazing. There were literally no modifications to the home save the replacement of a few doors. The floors were original, the baths, the kitchen… there was even a lack of multiple coats of paint. Even more amazingly, the oven and dishwasher had never been used… seriously… not light use, no use. That’s the original punch-card warranty slip in the bottom rack.

It’s like a car that had been bought and put into storage for 45 years. However, in that analogy, you’d still be dealing with dry-rotten hoses and belts… and that was the case with this house. Don’t try to fire up the dishwasher without a few towels handy. While all-original, some of the tiles have shrunken with age. The rubber welting on the windows had dried and cracked and there was some overall "yellowing"… but, wow, what a specimen. It was a joy to take a peek and will hopefully be bought by someone who appreciates the period-correct specimen.

Since it was a 3 bedroom model, all rooms were noticeably larger which was kind of nice… not sure which I prefer: more or larger rooms. The garage was even larger with a nice laundry/boiler-room configuration.

Since we’re in renovation, I was focused on the details on how this-met-up-with-that, but here are some images that hopefully show the overall lightly-used condition of the house.

Many folks know of the Eichler Network. Perhaps you even came here through a link from it. Although a great resource, the forum-area has an unusual policy of not allowing anyone to mention services or businesses or link to other resources. For instance, if I happened to find the holy-grail of sliding door lock actuators/switches (which I did), if I tried to mention the company by name, the post would be removed (which it was). This is fairly antithetical to the organic way social media and user forums operate and likely the reason why folks have posted open questions like: "is this site losing interest?"

Eichler Network Moderators:

You guys do the Eichler-owning community a great service — and you have a potentially great resource, but without information stored directly within the posts, a search is somewhat useless and little is saved for posterity. With links to other goods, services and sites, the community nature of a forum like this continues to grow. At the same time, interest in the site can also grow and posts can begin to generate more than one or two replies — and many duplicative posts will naturally fall-away as readers can search-for and find the information that they're looking for.

Or looking at it from another angle: if you say "no" often enough, people will stop asking and simply leave.

I visit plenty of forums just like yours — for different reasons, of course — and even those who take a dime from advertising champion the open and free exchange of information and only police the board for the most hateful or slanderous of posts.

For what it's worth, I'd gladly pay for a subscription to the Eichler Network's CA Modern Magazine to help the Eichler-cause if it meant I could search the forums and find a bounty of links and information.

Just a thought.

… but cute.

The lack of posting over the past two weeks wasn’t due to a lack of activity… on the contrary, between receiving 25 sheets of siding in the atrium, jetting off to Maine to photograph a friend’s wedding, and moving everything into the garage… well, it’s been a busy fortnight.

This question bothered my West Virginia born/bred father-in-law more than anyone else, but the name (redneckmodern) simply comes from the fact that it took us — a couple from Virginia (and I went to college in  "the Capitol of the Confederacy", Richmond) — moving to California and buying this house to justify the purchase of a full-size pickup truck. That’s all — nothing more…

Mary seems to have found a few new favorite haunts… in a house made of so much glass, there’s lots of sunny spots (and with a house as messy, a few places to hide — too bad the shelves were demolished yesterday).

Well, the sense of security that our bucolic setting provides was smashed last night when we found the car broken into this morning. Crap. Granted, it’s probable that we did leave it unlocked — we were hauling stuff in last night and likely forgot to batten down the hatches… and we were lucky that none of the windows were smashed and there were only a few small personal belongings stolen (a base-model iPod being one of them… I hope the thieves like Death Cab for Cutie and the Pixies).

Lesson learned, while were not in West Oakland, we do need to be careful. Sigh…

Contrary to the popular mantra: location, location, location — when we moved to Concord, we moved for the house… not the location. The thought of living this far outside our former comfort zone was frightening — and leaving our old neighborhood in West Oakland was bittersweet. The Eichler-built home was the brass ring — not the ZIP code. We moved on the 4th of July… an auspicious date and easy to remember: "Our independence from West Oakland!"

However, each day we're away, we find a new thing we love about Concord. Yesterday, it was the fact that there are 6 supermarkets in 2 mile radius — and 2 Home Depots (soon to be 3). Tonight it's tree-frogs… or crickets — I can't tell. But not gunshots… or the thump-thump of an 86 Olds with a blown subwoofer and rims worth more than the rest of the car… or drunken crack-addicts yelling at each other in the street. Instead it's a cool jasmine-scented breeze and the chirp-chirp of summertime. Nice.

But back on track… in reference to the title: when we lived in West Oakland, we kept a blog about living there as well… and compared to where we came home to this evening, it's a world away. I'm beginning to like it.

Christmas night, 2004, a stolen run-away van full of porno crashed into the front of our house in West Oakland. It took the OPD more than three hours to respond.