When Life Gets Messy in a Model Home
Just down the slope from my year-old gated community, a developer has broken ground for another housing tract.
Heavy equipment rumbles across dirt roads. Construction crews pound nails into two-by-fours. County and city workers keep a watchful eye on the site.
This semirural outpost--set among mountains, rocky ravines and rippling streams--on the far edge of the San Fernando Valley is reminiscent of the early housing developments that lured thousands of postwar families to an undeveloped region with the promise of suburban splendor.
Like those earlier generations seeking their piece of the American dream, my husband and I plunked down our life’s savings on a four-bedroom, three-bath home in this new neighborhood in January 2000.
On moving day, images of suburban living swirled through my mind. Lazy weekends reading The Times (both Los Angeles and New York), watching NBA games on television, strolling up the street to check the mailbox and barbecuing on the Weber.
Little did I know there would be more than a few bumps along the road to suburban bliss.
*
A move to Sylmar wasn’t exactly in our plans.
After we saved enough money for a down payment, we hoped to buy the Northridge house we had rented for three years, or some other house in the neighborhood, to avoid the hassle of moving two kids and a houseful of stuff across the Valley.
A real estate agent showed us several properties in Northridge and Porter Ranch. Not surprisingly, everything was either too small, too expensive--or both.
One afternoon, friends invited us to take a look at their new home site in Sylmar. I didn’t expect to be impressed. The only thing I knew about the area at the time came from news reports chronicling the misdeeds of drug dealers and gang bangers.
But tucked away in the hills southeast of Pacoima Dam was a quiet retreat within the bustling Valley. The gated community--bearing the hokey, market-tested name Mountain Glen offered new homes with sweeping views of the mountains and Valley floor.
After looking at their home site, our friends took our kids to the playground while the sales agent walked us through the two-by-four framework of a house under construction. She pointed to a hole in the wall where the fireplace would go and water pipes coming up through the master bathroom floor for the sunken tub.
Following weeks of hand wringing, we put down a deposit and launched the home buying process.
*
When moving day rolled around, I had the usual nether-worldly feeling of being surrounded by familiar things in an unfamiliar setting.
Once the boxes were unpacked, I was more than ready for those lazy weekends with newspapers, cable, backyard barbecues and walks to the mailbox.
I clicked on the TV. Nothing but snow.
I couldn’t get the mail. No mailbox key.
I called to start newspaper delivery. No routes.
I wanted to barbecue chicken on the grill. The howling of coyotes kept me indoors.
So much for my suburban fantasy. Cable television, newspaper delivery and mail service had yet to arrive in my neck of the woods. And the coyotes, rattlesnakes and lizards weren’t about to cede any ground.
I imagined how the Valley’s early suburban settlers must have felt trying to make a home where no home had been before.
Every day I hounded the cable company to send someone out to hook up the line. The customer service representatives said my neighborhood did not exist, according to their cable system maps. They finally got clued in after several people with similar street addresses requested service.
The Los Angeles Times’ subscription service, based in the Midwest, eventually figured out how to get the paper from the printing plant in Chatsworth to Sylmar. Stranger still, Daily News drivers delivered the New York Times.
After standing in line for 40 minutes at the Sylmar post office, the clerk couldn’t release the mailbox key because the neighborhood was considered a construction zone. The postal service had to look out for the safety of its carriers.
It took weeks before the city’s sanitation department got around to delivering the black, green and blue recycling bins. Thankfully, the construction crew was willing to haul away my reeking garbage. Paper products piled up in my garage.
As time passed, things got better. We met neighbors as we walked the streets of our community. We gathered around the kitchen table on a June evening to cut my son’s 7th birthday cake. The kids raced each other downstairs on Christmas morning.
Now, more than a year in my new home, all the suburban conveniences are in place: 70-plus TV channels, newspapers and mail delivery.
I’ve even come to listen for the coyotes’ howling in the distance at sunset.
Still, there is work to be done. The frontyard could use some spring flowers and thicker ground cover. And, in the backyard, the weeds are growing like children.
Looking back, I chuckle at my naivete in thinking that I could so easily slip into the lifestyle that the model homes promoted.
And, just as I did a year ago, those prospective buyers touring the new model homes down the slope are probably dreaming their own versions of the American dream--coyotes, cable TV, newspapers and long lines at the post office notwithstanding.
