Building a house in Palo Alto

(more photos on my Flickr photo album)

So I've decided to try to blog a bit about my experience building a house in Palo Alto. This is a project that I have been working on for the last 15 months or so. Home building is not something to be taken lightly, this coming from someone who is deep in it now. But, it ranks as one of the best experiences of my life, perhaps apart from getting married to my lovely wife.

My wife and I have been following the real estate market in the bay area, particularly Cupertino and Palo Alto, for about 4 years now. We saw the dot.com market crash, eroding away the landscape that Silicon Valley once was. In theory, it was supposed to work that the housing market would soon follow, and boom it would crash too. Well that never really happened. On the high-end of the scale ($2 million+) in high-end neighborhoods, indeed it did adjust quite a bit. But in many neighborhood (and overall bay area in general), after a bit dip in 2001-2002, the market has been progressively going up.

Knowing there was no way in hell we could afford what we wanted in Palo Alto, and wanting to live there (lived there for 7 years back in the day), we started scouring PA for fixer-uppers in good neighborhoods. Thanks to our lovely real estate agent from Coldwell Banker, she quickly hooked us up to two properties in mid-town Palo Alto. One turned out to be a real dump (in terms of property location), and the other a charming ranch style house on a quiet street near midtown. We won the bid against 15 other bidders, and off we went.

Palo Alto is not an easy city to build in. But, honestly, the people who work at the building center are gems. This being the first time I ever tried to build a house, I had lots of questions, and needed lots of good advice from professionals. First thing off, I thought I needed to talk to a good architect. In retrospect, the best option was to find and talk in detail to a good builder. Once I found a good builder, in this case RJ Haas in Saratoga, it made a huge difference to the project.

So not to bore you, here's the last 15 months:
- I designed 5 house designs myself using Better homes & Gardens home designer
- Handed off my blueprints to the architect after picking one
- A good 6 months of back and forth reviews with the architect
- City of Palo Alto individual review with the architectural review board (4 months)
- Building permit for the City of Palo Alto (4 months)

Finally we got the building permit this spring, and now around 3 weeks into the construction we have ground cleared, foundation done, and the framing started. More to come!