Furniture Divorce

In thinking about my upcoming move from Sunnyvale to San Francisco, I've been trying to decide which furniture to keep -- the new place is much smaller -- and how to get the rest to San Francisco, coordinating move-out, move-in, and maybe temporary storage in between.

But the real estate agent who's selling my old place made a brilliant suggestion: sell the old place with its furniture. While I really like that furniture, it was all chosen specifically for that house, and I'm not that attached to it.

Except for the piano.

I have a grand piano, 7 feet long from stem to stern, 5 feet across at the keyboard. It weighs 900 pounds. It's not that I'm a concert pianist or anything close, but I have been playing piano since I was in 5th grade, and I am attached to it.

I've had bad experiences with piano movers. When I moved from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale, one of the assistants took his own car instead of riding in the van, and on the way (it's a straight shot, 8 miles down a local expressway), he got lost. With one guy short, I had to grab some ropes and help out, especially when they got stuck on some curving stairs. That's when you realize the potential impact of 900 pounds. For this next move, I'm going to get references first.

But apart from the piano, and of course my clothes and some subset of my books (the rest will get recycled), I will bid a fond adieu to the furniture, tell the new owners that I hope they enjoy it as much as I did, and move on.

Moving to San Francisco

I live in Sunnyvale, which is quiet, safe, peaceful, 5 miles from where I work,and 5 miles from my friends in Cupertino. But I also have a little pied a terre in San Francisco since I go there so often for concerts. Here's a view of downtown from the deck of my apartment.

(Photo note: It had been a day where the fog came and went, came and went. Just at sunset, there was a moment where the sun peeked out, one last time, while half the city was already in shadow.)

In case it's been a while since you've seen the San Francisco skyline, you may wonder what that tall building is, smack there in the middle, right at the foot of the Bay Bridge. That's One Rincon Hill, a new condo tower, not quite open for business, that is perhaps the most prominent symbol of a revitalization effort for the city. There will be a second tower, behind this one. There are other such places in or near SOMA: The Infinity and Millennium Towers are all-condo. The Ritz-Carlton, The Four Seasons, and the St. Regis are condo-hotel combinations.

I'm moving to One Rincon Hill.

I've long thought I might eventually move to San Francisco, maybe when I retired, perhaps in a big old multi-unit building with a bunch of my music-loving friends, since we all go to operas and concerts together and get along so well. But things have a way of changing more quickly than we anticipate. Several factors motivated this decision. First, I looked at my fall calendar this year and saw that I was making at least one trip to San Francisco every week, often two, or staying for three or four days in a row.

Second, I think One Rincon Hill is a beautiful building, and I love high-rises.

Third, the company I work for has a San Francisco office not far ORH (One Rincon Hill), and there are shuttle buses from the Embarcadero to our Mountain View office, so I wouldn't have to drive on 101 every day. It's only 40 miles, but it is 101, which can be tedious even in the carpool lane.

Last but not least, when I walked in to the One Rincon Hill sales office, I met a terrific sales agent. I don't mean terrific just in the sense of being successful -- I did get a unit, after all -- but extremely friendly and helpful. I was just some random person walking in off the street, with no real estate agent helping me, and no "pre-qualifications" (i.e., prior approval for a loan), which some other places require, I hear.

She spent an hour telling me about the place, answering my non-stop questions, showing me the model unit they have set up, and going over the floor plans of the few units they had left in Tower 1, as well as discussing what they expect to have when Tower 2 opens, which breaks ground in January 2008.

Although I live alone, I have a 7-foot grand piano, so a one-bedroom unit wouldn't work. As luck would have it, a unit with 2 bedrooms and a den was available. Now, when ORH opened its sales office in the summer of 2006, 90% of the units sold within the first week. I'm sure that motivated the other developers to get their act in gear. At the high end of the market, there is no lack of buyers.

So how is it possible that this unit was still available? I later learned that someone had signed a contract for this unit but later changed her mind, so it just happened to be on the market again the day I happened to walk into the office. Surely that's a sign that I was meant to live there. (:-)

The sales agent and I talked about where the piano might go, and she told me about some other units that were available, but this was clearly the front-runner. I talked to my advisor at Merrill Lynch, and he said that if I wanted to move to San Francisco eventually, and I'd found a place I really liked, I should go now. It will only get more expensive. (Indeed, judging by the prices at The Infinity and Millennium Towers, it has already gotten more expensive.)

So I signed a contract for a unit on the sunny side of the 59th floor. (There are only 60 floors.) Residents in the first 29 floors will start moving in in January 2008 while the interior construction of the other floors is still underway. The move-ins are being carefully scheduled, and they're starting from the bottom and moving up, so I won't be able to close escrow or move into my new place until August 2008 at the earliest, possibly several months later, depending on the construction, how fast they can actually move people into the building, and what sort of furniture I want for the place. (The interior designers won't have access to the place until after the close of escrow.)

So, 2008 is going to be an interesting year.

Last note: I was fortunate enough to join some friends from a local architectural firm on a tour of ORH. After an interesting presentation about the history of the project and details of its construction, they took us up to the 60th floor. I headed over to the area directly above my place. Here's part of the view, one story up, from my future living room. If you wondered why this blog is called Sky Guy in SF, now you know.