Where to start?

You have to start somewhere, so the beginning is as good a place as any.

Sometime about May, 2002 my wife Julia and I, for the 10th time, placed a bid on a house we hoped to buy. This was the last chance, the wedding was approaching and we had decided that we could no longer handle the stress of signing an over-asking-price offer on the trunk of our realtor's car moments after having walked through a house for the first time.

This time was different. We were on a routine MLS drive-by when we called our realtor from the chain link fence in front of lucky number 10 without having been inside. "We want to make an offer on a house." The offer was exactly the asking price this time. There were no competing bids where previously there had been up to 20 or more and there was a certain sense of resolve: either we would get the house or we wouldn't. The one thing that was certain was that we would no longer be in the market for a house.



To try to make the start of a long story short, we got the house - 1000 square feet of ramshackle loveliness set on 23,000 square feet of a former olive orchard, moderately sloped and slightly terraced with a view to the six or so mile distant downtown Los Angeles skyline.

We have been slowly working to transform the property and our lifestyle into something that makes sense for us. We hope to document that transformation and it's lessons through this blog. We hope to connect with others who share some of our interests (urban homesteading, organic gardening, native plants) and values (DIY, creativity, simplicity) exchange ideas, and, if all goes well, find a sense of community.