Dreamlife March 6—Leslie

Type: looking at a house to buy
People: an older woman
Featured: an old, run-down B&B

I’m in San Francisco with a woman I know (a friend’s mother?) who wants to look at a property she’s interested in buying. It’s an old B&B that she’s thinking of resurrecting. They’re asking $750,00, which is really cheap for this big a lot in SF.

There are three separate buildings to the property. We go into the first, which is at street level: the dining room and kitchen. The dining area has been made into a sitting room with overstuffed, wearing-at-the-seam chairs and couches, cutsy “farm-house-style” wood decorations, and way too many tchotchkes. But the kitchen, though run-down, has some cool old 1930s-era appliances—stove and fridge.

“You think there’s a hard wood floor under this shag carpet?” I ask. We turn back the edge to find some ugly, scuffed, vinyl flooring. “But it could be fixed up,” I say. “It would be fun to do the decorating. I could help!”

We walk outside to go to the second building. There’s a dank, nasty smell. “Oh, that’s just the underground stream,” the woman tells me. I notice green slime all over the pathway. We get to a large barn-like structure, maybe an old carriage house, with high ceilings. Inside are several discrete areas. One, more finished than the rest, is surrounded by walls which don’t reach all the way to the ceiling. They remind me of a carousel. “That’s where I would sleep,” the woman tells me. There are two other stall-like areas with beds in them, but they are dusty and clearly haven’t been used in years.

We head off to the third building, which is uphill from the other two. “This part is still in great shape,” the woman says. “There are two bedrooms, with million dollar views of the bay.”

But I wake up before getting to see them.

Annotations:

Another house-buying dream, but no stress involved as it’s someone else who’s looking to buy.

When we first looked at our current Santa Cruz house, the sellers had the dining room set up as a sitting room, and a small table in the kitchen (where our island now is).

I don’t know why I would volunteer to help decorate the B&B, since I don’t like going up to SF. But I do like decorating.