This is Part Two of “Our House(s)” series, and here is where
it gets messy… The ten years between
1990 (when we filed for bankruptcy and we were foreclosed on) and 2000 (when we
were finally out of bankruptcy) were filled with disappointment, anger, despair
and grief. However, in the end, through
a lot of hard work, we prevailed, and we came out much stronger and wiser. In the year 2000 when we bought our Irvine
townhome on Tanglewood (more on that story later), we finally felt that we had
healed and that our lives were back to normal.
Nevertheless, what follows below is the story of our “coming of age”
decade, filled with both lows and highs (after all, both of our wonderful sons
were born during this decade), where we both worked like crazy, but also had
many moments of enjoyment and triumph.
So keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because this
is a wild ride!
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14874 Morningside Drive, Poway, CAThe story of our Little Professor Book Center franchise is
told elsewhere (if you are interested, you can check out my blog post “Working
for a living, Part Two”), but to make a long story short, in order to be closer
to the store, in June of 1989 we sold our house in Anaheim and in July of 1989,
we bought our house on Morningside Drive in Poway, CA. The location was actually really good; I
could walk from our house down to the store in about 8 minutes, and it had a
big corner lot. To me, that was a dream;
to be able to have a successful retail bookstore, and to be able to walk to
work, what could be better! Well, better
yet, it had a pool! To me that was the
epitome of Southern California living; I had already had the convertible, so
now having a house with a pool was a true mark of success! (One of our shopping center neighbors, who
had owned a house with a pool told me that “a pool is just a hole in the ground
that you throw money in to”, but I chalked that up to sour grapes. Unfortunately, his comment turned out to be
true; it seemed that no matter how much chlorine I put in that pool, it was
never enough. Also, I would spend some
two hours every Saturday just cleaning the pool, which was not that fun… Live and Learn…).
The house was not crazy special; some 1,200 square feet,
three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but the lot, at almost 9,000 square feet, was
huge (for Southern California, mind you)!
The pool at Morningside Drive and a picture of our
Little Professor Book Center franchise. However, even though the house was built in 1985, it
still needed work. First off, the house
was infested with fleas, so almost immediately we had to set off a couple of
flea bombs in the house in order to kill the little buggers. Also, in order to make the pool safe for our
one-year old daughter Chelsea, we installed a vinyl pool cover, which made the
pool into a giant waterbed. Since the
pool cover was secured with rivets and had to be rolled up every time we were
to use the pool, it became more of a chore than a feature, and we didn’t use
the pool as much as I had first envisioned.
Also, the two front bedrooms had been extended into the two-car garage,
in order make some sort of sitting rooms, which had rendered the garage
unusable. So, I decided to demolish the
extensions, to turn the garage back to a, well you guessed it, a garage. Also, there was a large (unpermitted, I’m
sure) wooden deck in the backyard, held up in places by boulders and rocks, as
opposed to real concrete footings. So,
we rented a 40’ garbage container, and we filled the whole thing with
construction debris from the demolition of the garage extensions and the
backyard deck. Finally, we ordered a
bunch of gravel to put in the backyard instead of the deck, and it turned out
pretty nice. However, by the fall of
1989, the writing on the wall regarding the (un)viability of the store started
to become evident. We were still losing about $3,000 a month from the store,
which we financed by both of us working, and by maxing out our credit
cards. So, in the fall of 1989, we
decided to sell Morningside Drive, and move back to Orange County, to be closer
to Executive Express, so that we could at least make some money to survive. We finally sold Morningside Drive in December
of 1989, and moved to our new house in Aliso Viejo, CA. We only stayed at Morningside Drive for six
months, which is the shortest time we ever stayed at any house.
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9 Spicewood, Aliso Viejo, CAIn January of 1990, we bought our house on Spicewood, in
Aliso Viejo, CA. We pretty much knew
that the bookstore was doomed, so we wanted to move back to Orange County, to
be closer to family and closer to work.
Since the house was only about a year old, we didn’t do any sort of
remodeling, but I do remember putting up shelves in the garage. Initially, we harbored the idea that we could
work with the bank that had given us the loan for the bookstore to get the
principal and payments lowered; however, we quickly realized that a bank is in
the business of making money, not losing it.
So, sometime in late summer – early fall of 1990, Bank of La Costa
foreclosed on our house on Spicewood, and we were homeless and pretty much
penniless. This was pretty much the
worst time in our married life, since we had put so much pride in being
homeowners, and for Kathy, I think the loss of our house on Spicewood inflicted
a wound that took a decade or more to heal.
To
add insult to injury, since we had also filed for bankruptcy in the spring of
1990, our credit was completely ruined, and we couldn’t even rent an
apartment. However, we were lucky enough
that we found a private landlord who was willing to rent their little townhome
in Irvine to us, even with the bankruptcy and foreclosure baggage. So, sometime in the fall of 1990, we moved
(actually, we were forced to move) out of Spicewood, and we moved to rented
accommodations on Senisa, in the University Park area of Irvine.
In retrospect, moving to Irvine proved to be a great move
for us, even though we were initially renting.
Irvine has great schools, great parks, all the amenities one could ask
for, and, at least at the time that we moved in, a small suburb feel. We ended up staying in Irvine for 31 years,
and all three of our kids went from Kindergarten through High School in Irvine,
which prepared them really well for their futures. Over the years, we spend soooo much time with
the kids at the Irvine parks, pools and shopping centers, and I thought I would
never leave Irvine. Then we had a
grandchild, and life changed, but more on that story later!
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23 Songsparrow, Irvine, CA
After we had gone through the self-inflicted pain of
bankruptcy and foreclosure in 1990, we thought that we would be healed by
buying another house, but with our credit being completely destroyed, our
options were limited. However, we
started looking for properties where the owners were willing to carry a
mortgage (at a high interest rate of course), and we found 23 Songsparrow in
the community of Woodbridge in the city of Irvine, CA. The owners owned the property outright, so
they agreed to sell the house, and carry the loan. We had been able to save up some money, so
with some 10% for a down payment, we bought the house in April of 1992! We had initially looked at the house on a
rainy evening, and we didn’t even go out in the backyard, since we were sooo
excited to buy another house, so we didn’t notice that the backyard backed up
to the busy street Culver (which was not a good thing…).
23 Songsparrow, Irvine, CA. You can see how the property backs up to
Culver, which is a very busy street, connecting the 405 freeway to the south,
and the 5 freeway to the north. At least
once a month, we would hear car crashes on Culver…
However, the location was not all bad; Songsparrow itself
was a very quiet street, and we were two minutes away from Bluejay Park, which
was a great place for Chelsea to play.
Also, Woodbridge is a great place to live, especially if you have kids;
there are parks and pools everywhere and coupled with two man-made lakes (North
Lake and South Lake), it is one of the best planned communities in the
world.
Nevertheless, with me going to school and working (since we
were both working for Executive Express, with me going to school I just
couldn’t take all the runs that I would normally had been able to take), our
finances were stretched to the limit.
After about two years, we realized that we just couldn't pay the
mortgage, considering all of our other normal expenses. So, sometime in 1994, we put the house up for
sale, but the real estate market had taken a turn for the worst. The only serious offer we got for the house
was about 90% of what we had paid in 1992, so we were stuck. So, we made the decision to do a quit-claim
deed, where we essentially deeded the house back to the former owners, and we
rented it from them for about a year (with the rent payment being about half of
what we had previously paid for the loan payments). This was of course a big disappointment, but
sometimes you need to make some unpleasant decisions, which, in the end, will
build your character. It also showed us
that material things (like a house) does not mean happiness, only achievements
that we complete within ourselves lead to true happiness and fulfillment.
Sometime in 1995, our landlord decided to raise our rent
quite a bit, and we moved out of the house on Songsparrow. For about four years, we rented a townhome on
Briarwood, also in the village of Woodbridge, in Irvine. Again, Woodbridge is great, and since Chelsea
was in school just down the street, it made perfect sense for us to stay in
Woodbridge. I think we stayed at the
Briarwood townhome until late sometime in 1999, when, in anticipation of buying
our own house (again), we moved into an apartment on Alton Parkway, also in
Woodbridge, where we stayed for about 6 months, until we bought our townhome on
Tanglewood, but more on that story later!
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