portlandia

Photo Galleries of Homes in East Sacramento and Elsewhere

East Sacramento homeEvery morning, before I start my day as a Sacramento real estate agent, I clear all of the spam and junk emails from accounts and try to respond to the people who contact me out of the blue. This is the thing about writing online articles and blogging for so many years is you never know when a person will read a piece and believe it was just published. That’s timeless writing, and evergreen, and while some things are very specific and change from year to year, stately mansions and historic homes tend to inhabit a sacred spot on earth.

Today a writer thanked me for publishing homes in NW Portland. I love Portland to pieces, and not just because we really don’t have to be on the lookout at all times for Wesen or because Portlandia is so hilariously amusing, but because it’s a great city. Sacramento often looks to Portland as a model city: modern, ahead of its times, progressive. And it boasts several historic districts.

Historic district preservation has its foes and its supporters in Sacramento. The supporters are generally people who love homes. I’m not in real estate just to list and show houses, I do it partly because I love homes. Period. All kinds of houses. I had dollhouses as a kid; I built playhouses out of discarded composition shingles at building sites, and I even once drew a diagram of a floor plan in the street in front of my house. I used drywall chalk. I lived in a new subdivision called Heritage Homes in the then Village of Circle Pines, Minnesota, and homes were still being built around us for years after my family moved from Saint Paul.

I drew a floor plan with bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. I had wanted my younger sister to go into the woods and play, but she didn’t want to let go of her teddy bear, and she couldn’t take it with us, for some reason. So, I put her teddy bear in the bedroom in the middle of the street and locked the imaginary door. Of course, when we came back from playing in the woods, her teddy bear was gone. She still speaks to me, though.

Here are photo galleries of homes in Sacramento, along the northern coast of California in Mendocino and in Northwest Portland, Oregon. I hope you enjoy them.

Homes in East Sacramento, Sacramento, California

Homes in Land Park, Sacramento, California

Homes in Mendocino, California

Homes in Portland, Oregon’s Nob Hill Neighborhood in NW Portland

My Idea For an Episode of Portlandia

City-of-Portland copyEvery day I look for the silver linings in life; because no matter how stressful my day has been, there is always something good happening that I could focus my attention on instead. It’s my secret recipe for staying happy in the middle of strife and turmoil. You can’t be a real estate agent in Sacramento and not be on intimate terms with strife and turmoil in today’s real estate market.

The trick is to fill your brain with fun and interesting data, while leaving the essential facts such as the square footage and sales price of my Land Park listing at 1620 Sutterville Road still at the top of my brain. There is only so much room up there in the attic. At my age, it’s come to a point that if something goes in, something else has to come out. But I have left a space for smart entertainment. One such television show that I love to watch as I unwind from my day is Portlandia, and the new season of Portlandia has finally arrived.

It’s one of the few shows on TV that actually makes me laugh out loud. The writing and cast are brilliant. No wonder they attract such top name talent, too. It’s a little over the top, but only by a smidgeon. Not enough to be completely unbelievable. Besides, most funny things are based in truth somewhere along the line.

It carries over into my dreams, apparently. Because this morning I woke up in a bit of a haze from a dream in which I was writing a segment for Portlandia. It involved flat-screen TVs and how to watch DVDs, versus streaming video, versus TV, versus cable channels and recording 2 shows at once. Stuff your 5-year-old can do but you, being over the age of 30, cannot. And, then, the show ends with the two stars, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, sitting in a Home Depot on top of paint cans, sharing a bag of popcorn and watching a football game without sound on a big screen TV for sale.

Hey, Carrie, send the residual check to my home in Land Park. In the meanwhile, I won’t give up my day job of being a Sacramento real estate agent.

Photo of Portland, by Elizabeth Weintraub

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