STATUS ON HOME PURCHASE

Since my ranch sold, I have been aggressively looking for a home to purchase.  Looking all over from the southern northern California area up to the northern most part of the state.

A few days ago, I ventured up to Yreka, CA.  I heard it was cheap to live and really beautiful there.

When I got there, I pretty much knew what to expect.  Really no shopping to speak of except a Superwalmart, Raleys supermarket, which is always expensive and your regular, very few other necessary stores and services; i.e., eye doctor, tire store, mechanics.  It really is a stop for gas town, which is about $.50 more a gallon, and maybe to run into Walmart if you've forgotten something for your trip heading into Oregon.

Most of the area is rolling hills with pine trees and manufactured homes with acreage.  Some people farm horses and cattle.  Most people just live there with their families or alone.  Nothing much doing there socially either.

I contacted a realtor up there and she sent me some homes to see in my price range.  Even though the acreage on some of the homes was really great, the homes, even though they looked OK in the photos she sent me via e-mail, were pretty bad when seeing them in person.  The realtor also told me in a vague way that water there was very expensive if you had to get it through the city.  If you had a well, it may run dry, is dry or is bad water.  This kind of scared me to begin with because anywhere I've lived, I've never had to think twice about the water source or the quality of the water.

Many of the homes also used space heaters which ran on kerosene.  How dangerous is that, and again, very expensive to run?

Another thing that bothered me about purchasing there is that there are fees every month or year that you had to pay, depending on the association area you were in, because they keep up the roads.  Well, isn't that whey we pay taxes?  This other cost to some bureaucrats also bothers me and seemed a little shifty. 

As far as the beauty of the area, I still feel where I'm living now is prettier.  There were pine trees there, but very few other varieties of foliage and trees were visible.

So I guess Yreka is off my list.

As I was driving down the 5 Freeway going home, I saw a sign for Shasta Dam.  So I took a little side trip.  How nice that was to have a little stress reliever of seeing the beauty of the area.  I walked over the dam, went into the small visitors' center, took some photos, which I'll post when I edit them in the next few days.

My next stop was going south to Redding.  A cute little town I've been to before.  The outlying areas that I wanted to see was about an hour away in each direction.  There was a home in each area, but I was so exhausted, only saw a small house in a residential area nearby. 

The neighborhood wasn't that great, but close to all the shopping you could want and a short ride to the outlet stores.  The home was completely remodeled with a cute backyard, but as I looked through the fence of the neighbors on either side of this home, one had trash all over, although the front of his home was meticulously kept?  What's that all about?  I heard a few of the dogs in the neighborhood barking.  The homes were very, very close to each other.  There you were definitely paying for the location.

That was it and I was heading home, which felt like it took forever.  The 5 Freeway is really fast.  You can go 70 mph on a lot of it.  I did want to stop at Trader Joe's in Folsom so I could buy a hunk of Romano cheese, which I ran out of recently.  It's cheap there and really delicious.  I've bought Roman cheese by the hunk at the supermarkets, which is very expensive, but I keep going back to Trader Joe's, which in my opinion, is the very best.  I also purchased some Brie cheese and Greek yogurt which were also at very good prices. 

When I arrived home, my cat, now sometimes losing bladder control, came running to me.  I was happy to see he was still alive and he didn't have any accidents while I was gone, so I gave him a lot of attention.

So, in evaluating the places I saw and where I live now, I'd stay in this beautiful area.  My second choice would be Redding, but I'd really have to see something there that would knock my socks off before I made the move.