The Beach is Best

Editorial Rating:

Reader Rating: ( 0 votes)

As a devoted surfer, I have been plying the Washington State coast for about a decade. The place can be warm, sunny, and inviting with broad sand beaches and great beach going. The Pacific Northwest can also be dark, cold, and very wet foreboding place. Which is probably why as of three years ago, one could still purchase a half-acre lot in the dunes for as little as $15k. No matter the periods of difficult weather and shortened winter daylight, I fell in love with it all; enough so to continue surfing once or twice a week, year round, despite living two hours away in Seattle.


Having met wife of tres_arboles on the beach in San Diego when we were young and frisky, I had a surprisingly difficult time convincing her to join me on one of my weekly surfabouts until our young son hit his fourth birthday, three years ago. Finally, after at least five years of cajoling, we went down to the beach as a family. We rented a place on the beach, ate albacore tuna fresh off the boat, and played Uno until we couldn’t stand getting beat by son of tres_arboles any longer. Oh yeah, and the family did hit the surf together; one of the highpoints of my life.


Having taken a quick look around for a few days, and having decent business sense, wife of tres_arboles made the call, “We’d better lock up a nice piece of land here, quick.” The next month, we went back down and bought a parcel just south of the lighthouse, about two hundred yards from the water at highest high tide. It wasn’t a hard choice: the lot was nearly flat, with great exposure on four sides, and decent dune vegetation including older coastal scrub pine and spruce. Oh, and did I mention the price was in the early 20’s and the seller carried the contract?


(Was it a snap decision? Probably, but necessarily so. Last spring, the realtor (who I surf with periodically) begged me to flip the property, promising we could easily list it at three times the purchase price!)


Suddenly, any media oriented toward home building took on interest to us. Family of tres_arboles consumed plan books, HGTV (then newly added to our cable line-up), and even “This Old House.” Having general contracted the building of a fairly deluxe garage at our previous house, we were confident we could build the beach house/ surfer retreat of our dreams. If only we could make up our minds what it would look like...to be continued!