House Hunting in Ventura, CA

We decided to start looking for a house in January of 2008. We have been renting a home in East Ventura since last fall. Ventura is a beach community with mountains to the north, and farms to the east. The entire town stretches narrowly from west to east. Downtown (and the beach) are on the west, and the east is more suburban with newer construction (and takes about 15 minutes to get downtown!) While our neighborhood is very safe and friendly, it is out of the way from EVERYTHING we like to do in town. We are also in a lease until August 31st, 2008, and don't want to rent forever!

Here is our current house:


We contacted Stuart Monteith and Dale King. You can visit their website at www.homesbystuart.com Stuart works mostly out of Santa Paula but her partner Dale handles Ventura. We did not make it easy for them. Here are some of the things we wanted on our list.

Wants:
older than 1940
rear or detached garage
arched entranceways
original hardwood floors
big yard with grass
mature fruit trees
architecture!

Dale and Stuart pointed us to the Ventura County MLS so we could get cracking. It was hard for us to find anything that fit our needs in an area we liked. Houses were either in yucky neighborhoods, or just completely lacking in architecture, or in East Ventura (where we don't want to be anymore).

We searched online everyday for months, and visited a few more homes. We finally narrowed our search to Ventura, and the Midtown area.