I moved here from Chicago (and have also lived in LA) and you really, really should rent first. Housing prices are not going to zoom up anytime soon. The banks have a large shadow inventory and CA is one of the three worst states for foreclosures. It is very time-consuming to buy a foreclosure. Figure it will take 4x longer than to buy normally. Homes in foreclosure are often in bad shape; quality of construction in CA is often very low. Labor costs are high and skillful workers harder to find than they should be. Do not assume you can remodel a not-so-perfect house into what you want. The NIMBY-ism here is hideous and in all the major cities it is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to enlarge a home's footprint. You are legally constrained from covering more than 40% of your lot anyway, I believe, and with our small lots that's not a big footprint. Permits are expensive to obtain and if you make structural changes, it will be required that you bring everything up to current building code. Since every year brings in stricter earthquake building codes, this can add so much to the cost that remodeling projects become impossible. For example, our neighbor wanted to turn their downstairs into a legal in-law: adding a second bathroom, building a single-story, one-room addition. They had $75K in cash as their budget (we live in the Oakland foothills, nice older area, starter homes). It took them over $12K and almost two years to go through the permit process. Eventually they were told they had to apply for a waiver because they were taking 2' from the single-car garage which was already minimum size allowed, so they had to have the architect re-draw the plans and resubmit them. Permit cost, BTW, is 10% of the cost estimate in our city. The City of Oakland does the engineering study for all projects. As we live on a hill (great east-facing hillside views), they were told to stabilize their lot, it would be necessary to sink 40 piers, each 37' deep to bedrock, filled with steel rebar and concrete. 25 of the piers would be for the single-room addition (which was only going to be about 17x25') and the remaining 15 would be placed all along the north side of the existing house. The cost for the pier work alone? $65,000. Needless to say, they did something else with their remaining $63K. You might be surprised what you pay for utilities here. PG&E is one of the most expensive utilities in the country, and most older homes aren't insulated well. Our home is insulated with double-pane windows, we live in a warmer microclimate than Berkeley, I keep my home fairly cool, yet we pay on average $170/mo for gas (furnace/dryer/stove) and electricity. No one can place any dependency on PG&E absorbing all the costs for their unmapped leaking gas mains (a neighborhood in San Bruno saw its gas main blow up and 8 people died); we ratepayers will almost certainly see our rates rise yet again. Water isn't that expensive, but earthquake-proofing our EBMUD water reservoirs is. Our bi-monthly water bill for a large garden (1/6 acre) and 3 people runs $45 for water and $100 for earthquake work. We do have earthquake insurance. There is a fault that runs right through Alameda County and it's overdue for another major quake. Homeowners insurance is fairly low - less than $1K, and umbrella liability is around $200/yr. Earthquake insurance with a $100K deductible costs us almost $4000/yr. However, we have no mortgage so we are carrying all the risk on our home. It made sense for us to purchase risk mitigation. To be afraid of all of Oakland is ridiculous. There are some very good neighborhoods here, just as there are some bad neighborhoods in Berkeley. If I were buying for the first time, I'd look in El Cerrito on the east side of San Pablo Ave. Good, stable neighborhoods, nice weather, easier city traffic, great services/shops. I like Alameda, but access is limited to the bridges, and traffic is easily snarled at commute times. Traffic is the huge issue in the Bay Area. If you are still working, you need to really see how the traffic patterns work, not just when things go right but when things go wrong. Public transit is pathetic compared to Chicago, NY and Boston. Cars are a necessity in the East Bay; you can get around without one but it will take forever and making transfers between systems is a pain. Don't ignore the sales tax. The first time you pay sales tax on a new car, you will definitely feel the pain! Food is a conundrum: you can spend less and get higher quality, but on average Bay Area residents eat out more often than anyone else except New Yorkers, over 4x/week. I don't mean to sound discouraging. We love living here but there is no denying CA is an extremely expensive state. State income taxes are high and services are dwindling. You will find politics very different here than back East.

My old master bedroom was 20x20 and had a huge cathedral ceiling. Just airy and wonderful. I fell in love with that room from the moment I walked into it. But, it was impossible to heat and cool properly. In the summer, it was too hot and in the winters it was too cold. I don't know how high the ceiling went up to, but you can see from the angle that there is some definite space there. A thought I'll add though is this was the 2nd story of the house and our house was a spec home built by D.R. Horton who just didn't build it in a quality way. Our new house is going to have up to 10 foot ceilings and I we probably could have gotten away with 9 foot ceilings. No way to 8 foot. I am over 6'0 and 8 foot ceilings seem so tight to me. We are doing a double box ceiling in the master for some height, but not too much. I live in Texas and experience all 4 seasons. We have freezing winters and 100+ degree summers. The more room you have, the more space you have to heat and air condition. I would imagine though, if you have good insulation and get some good windows that you wouldn't have to deal with the problems we had as much.

Rocky, for the time being we will use our architect's plans. Our plans are not currently final but I think that our house will be quite close to our current plans. So it will be a custom home and the modular builder's price reflects that. Our plans have a lot of features that I would want (considering the $$'s that we are spending) -- such as a formal entry area, and it's hard for us to find stock plans that offer all this anyway. That said, I would highly recommend going through stock plans first to check if they have what you are looking for, and if needed, make minimal modifications to them. That would save design costs for you. Just my 2c. And shop, shop shop! We had one of the contractors who told us that painting alone may cost 40K and considering that it "shows", we should get a good quality painter, even though it's expensive. I agree in principle, but I found someone who has excellent workmanship and he has quoted 25K for exact same job. Prices do vary a lot. Lastly, regarding your comment about the area supporting the route: yes our area supports either route price-wise, and we will get our money back. Our main problem is not recouping the costs, but it's more like raising so much cash without touching other important investments such as retirement etc.

I think maybe your issue is that you have a bad plumber who isn't very helpful. I went through an extensive remodel and dealt with the Title 24 issues in detail. If you take the time to figure out what's needed up front, then it's mostly straightforward. Not completely, but mostly. It's when you do shopping first and then learn about the Title 24 rules afterwards that it will get difficult and very frustrating. Most quality plumbing fixtures have a version with restricted flow that will work with Title 24. I didn't have to make one plumbing choice in either the kitchen or bathrooms that was compromised due to Title 24. But I did have to make sure to buy the version that was Title 24 compliant. Lighting is the most difficult one to figure out. The issue is that the 2013 Title 24 regulations went one way and forced all the lighting manufacturers to use GU24 socket connectors. That really limits choice. With the 2016 code, they've gone the other way and now let you use regular socket connectors but you need to use fixtures that are LED certified.. Recessed lighting isn't a problem because all the best lights (Cree, DMF) are already compliant. It's all the other lights that are a problem. Many of the nice lights you see at the store are LED but not 90+ CRI and not certified -- so they are not allowed in CA under 2016. On the flip side, I think these regulations really do make a difference. There's no reason people should be putting in old wasteful lights and water fixtures in their houses, simply because they haven't been educated or informed about higher-efficiency products. On a large scale it massively reduces our energy footprint, and the inconvenience to learn about what's required isn't really that much.