Our blue heaven

I thought I’d share a bit about where Thom and I will be living. We’re relocating to Daly City, my hometown. In fact, we will be living in the very house where I grew up. When I was in the third grade, my family moved to a different house in Daly City, but they kept the old house and had been renting it out to various tenants over the years. Fortuitously, it’s currently vacant and perfect for Thom and me to rent. (Ah, parents as landlords.)

The house (photo here by Thom) was built around 1955–judging from one of the building permits still posted in the garage–in the Westlake district of Daly City, a residential area just south of San Francisco, full of small houses mass-developed by Henry Doelger in the mid-twentieth century. When I was a kid, growing up in that house in late 1970s and early ’80s, I didn’t think of the area as anything special, but lately there’s been a resurgence in midcentury chic and I was surprised to see a story about the Doelger homes in Atomic Ranch magazine last year. Some of them clearly have modish elements (like slanted roofs and tilted front windows), while others are less distinctive. In any case, with a series of common floor plans and uniform patches of lawn, it’s very suburbia. (The Westlake section of the Daly City History website has some neat information and photos by Rob Keil, whose forthcoming book on Westlake is called Little Boxes.)

A couple of weekends ago, my parents and I took Thom on a walk-through of the house, and he took some photos, which are up on his Flickr site. (By the way, the exterior wasn’t always that color; earlier this year my mom told the painters “sky blue,” and sure enough I think it would disappear against the sky… if Daly City weren’t so foggy.) That day was the first time Thom had seen the house, and I was glad and relieved when he took a liking to it. Last night we were talking about all the yellow tile in the kitchen, and he suggested we get all yellow appliances, like a yellow toaster and so on. “And a yellow KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer?” I asked. “Do me now,” he said. Yes, I think we were meant to be together.