Our First Home

Five and a half years we've been married, and lived in a city the whole time. We met and got married in sunny San Diego, California, and after a year there we were tempted by higher wages in the Bay Area, and decided to make the move to the cool gray city of love, San Francisco. We love everything about the city: the fog (named Karl), the culture, the shops and amazing restaurants... But we were lacking one thing: land.

We longed for wide open land for our kids to run free. We're homeschoolers, so I guess the freedom-mindset is in our DNA. We really do like to roam. Finally, last summer we began to look at houses with property. "This one has 5 acres!" or "This one's on 120 acres, but boy is it a fixer upper!" We looked at huge houses on little chunks of deserty land and we looked at huge parcels of beautiful rolling hills--with no house built yet.

After a rollercoaster of one escrow process falling though, we toured a ranch in Mariposa, California. It sat on 40 acres of forest and meadow, with a seasonal creek running through the middle of it. Since it was January after a season of record rainfall, the "creek" looked more like a raging river, bounding down huge granite boulders in a magnificent waterfall.

Needless to say, we fell in love with that ranch, and as Providence would have it, escrow went smoothly and quickly, and on Valentines Day, 2017, we became homeowners.

We arrived at our new ranch a few weeks later to start the enormous project of making it a home. The previous owners had left a few pieces of furniture behind, so with our favorite queen size airbed and a few sleeping bags, we had the necessities to be able to enjoy ourselves right away.

Our first night there, we discovered a surprise: frogs! We had appreciated the little pond built into the landscaping in the front yard, but we didn't realize until the sun went down that first night that it was home to a very large community of croaking frog families. They serenaded us to sleep that first night, and haven't stopped since!