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.

What kind of climate does the new house have? What kind of insulation? Even if they're not expensive, do you lay down wines for years ahead, or buy your wines aged and drink them within a year or so? Even a normally cool place can get hot enough to disturb wine during a heat wave (voice of experience). That being the case, and since A/C can fail, blackouts happen, etc., it's best to keep wines away from exterior walls, and low. A little extra insulation, and some cool retainers like concrete or tile, can make a fairly inexpensive wine cupboard. But if you have more wine than will fit in a a small cupboard, you probably have more wine than you can drink in a season. In that case, yes, it's worth putting in a stoarage apparatus, whether it's tricked out wine closet/room, a freestanding cellar, or just a wine fridge. How much money do you have invested in your inexpensive wines? I would guess that the total would be a good guide for how much to spend on storing it. (Of course, if you had a proper cellar you might be motivated to increase your oenophilia).

I'm sorry about the apples. Since we left California 17 years ago now, I didn't realize even avocados are problematic. Given...everything, even here in the east I've given up most intensive hobby gardening in favor of landscaping, with new structural plants, brought in as necessary, chosen for resilience as conditions change. Color really does look different in different climates. I remember being stopped in my tracks at a SoCal beach house by the stunning beauty of vibrant purple morning glories with another, crayon-orange-flowered vine together on a white fence. Not garish--exquisite! In those days I had a 12-month-a-year flower garden in bloom at my home only 30 miles inland, but those same flowers never looked that vibrant in my garden, and that combination could never have glowed so wonderfully there. That's okay. Like Ingrid's, less than fully saturated colors were very lovely instead.

>>similar comments as to fire risk during drought years because the grass/weeds/underbrush had become tinder dry. I'm not sure which is right, is risk higher after dry winters or after wet ones? - Elmer F.>> As far as I know it's held that the risk is slightly higher after wet winters because it encourages new green growth in the hills that simply dies when summer comes and the rains stop. In a Mediterranean climate native plants go mostly dormant in summer. The other six Mediterranean regions of the world share our pattern of wet winters and dry, high fire danger summers. One of the comments my niece made when she visited us for the first time, in a July or August, was "Wow, I thought CA was green all the time! How come everything's brown and dried up?" Being from Chicago, everything IS green in the summer, LOL, so she was puzzled by endless hills with nothing but dead grass and a few scattered stands of evergreen bushes/trees. The danger in dry winters is not so much an occasional dry year, but when there's an entire succession of them as there has been during our last drought. It stresses the evergreens and makes them very vulnerable to bark borer beetles (there's a variety of different ones). Thus, photos of the Sierras around Tahoe and Hwy 80 show a terrifying number of dead trees after 7 yrs of drought. When a fire starts up there - which is inevitable, it's part of the ecosystem - it may well dwarf anything we've seen in the Wine Country. There is simply no way for CalFire to fight a major firestorm when it's inside impassible canyons and chasms. All they can do is pick defensible spots and try to hold them to minimize loss of life and structural damage. Getting back to the Wine Country fires, SF Chronicle had this photo on a slideshow today, by Paul Chan/Chronicle: