I promised a friend I would blog about this 
In 2007, I scraped together savings and some money from my mother and father to buy a cottage. It was right before the market went CRASH.
The house is really sweet, but it has foundation issues. Well, big foundation issues. I got part of it fixed – reinforced by a contractor – and that part of the house seems fine. However, the other part is developing big cracks in the walls (or rather, the cracks are re-appearing after having been plastered over by the seller before I bought the house – it is vintage 1919 and at the edge of the famous Berkeley “Keith landslide.”) So it is kind of disintegrating.
The thing is, I was shown this house years ago in a waking dream when I despaired of ever finding a place for my son and me. Finding it is a magical story in itself – I’ll post that later. Of course, within every Gift is a Challenge, right?
Have to return to work – more on this later
Carolina
In 1991 life hit me in the face, as it does to help you Awaken. However, I did not know this bit about Awakening and so I sank into despair so deep that I considered jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I knew I couldn’t do that but I considered it. At the darkest level of this, I popped into what I can only call a “waking dream” where I was fully conscious but “somewhere else” – not in my house. I was in a classroom and a woman was writing on the black board the lesson I had just been given. She elaborated on it and I “got it”; then I asked if she would show me the house I would get for my son and me (thinking this would surely happen soon, which it didn’t). She said yes and took me swiftly to a yellow house. I was horizontal so I floated around in the house and looked down. When I looked down I saw the rug that was at that time (1991) in my bedroom – it was an orange-y fake persian rug. Then I popped back into my body and wrote the experience in my journal.
Fast forward to 2007. I have totally forgotten this experience and am frantically looking for a place since the house I was living in was being sold out from under me. I had scraped together savings and had some money from my parents to help me out. However, the only places I thought I could afford had bars on the windows and I would have been really scared for my son commuting to college from any of these.
I finally gave up and threw out the window any ideas of “what I could afford” and decided to look at some open houses in a neighboring town. To get there, I felt a pull to go down a street I usually would not go down. Just as I was driving down it, a man was putting a “for sale/open house” sign in front of a gorgeous vintage Berkeley Brown-shingle duplex. I thought “What the hell – I’ll see how the other half lives” and parked the car.
I couldn’t find the house for sale until I ended up walking into the backyard of the brown-shingle duplex. There in front of me was the yellow cottage shown to me in 1991. I still did not remember the experience I’d had, I just noted that it was probably beyond me but I’d look. It was listed as a 2-bedroom/2 bath cottage and was in the upper range of “what I could afford.” I ended up staying the whole time, pacing the floor and calling my realtor. You see, the second bedroom and bath were downstairs – someone had converted what had been a garage (house was built in 1919 as an in-law unit) into a lovely studio apartment without a kitchen. Every single other person who came to see the house that day had very young children. It would not work for them, but my college-age son would have an apartment of sorts until he could fly on his own. Later, after I bought the house, I was looking down from the dining area, and in the house next door, where they had curtains open, was a rug identical to the rug that used to be in my bedroom in 1991. It was an unusual rug and I’d long ago had to part with the one I had. I went to my journals and found the entry – it was the place.
However (there always is a qualifier, isn’t there?) the place had a scary foundation report but I bought it because another contractor said he could reinforce the existing foundation and fix the central piers for less money than all the other contractors, who wanted to demolish the studio apartment. I had the “reinforcement” contractor do his work and that part of the house seems okay. The other half is getting cracks (one person told me the cracks are just showing up again – they’d been carefully plastered over before selling the place) and the floorboards snap-crackle-pop when I walk on them.
If anyone out there knows about foundations and things that can be done with little money, please let me know. I’d like to save the structure if I can. My job seems to be going away so the house may also have to go, but if I can save it, I’d like to.
Well, that is the story – please comment
Carolina
